welcome to Conlang Critic: the show that gets
facts wrong about YOUR favorite conlang! Iām jan Misali, and in this episode, weāll be
looking at the language of the planet, Lingwa de Planeta. at the time of writing, most people who are
subscribed to my channel subscribed in the past month. to all of you new subscribers,
welcome! I plan on continuing to make video essays like hangman is a weird game, but the
main thing I make for this channel is this little hyper-niche show about linguistics. Conlang Critic is a show where I describe
and review constructed languages, which are called āconlangsā for short, and right
now is the first time Iāve ever felt the need to explain that in an episode of Conlang
Critic itself. Iāve always assumed a level of familiarity with conlanging from my audience
that it just doesnāt make sense to assume anymore. so, this episode of Conlang Critic is going
to be a special one. I would like to use this review of Lingwa de Planeta as a way of demonstrating
what a conlang is to those of you who are unfamiliar with conlangs or even linguistics.
I will attempt to make as few assumptions about prior knowledge as possible. and for any cute frauds out there who have
already watched every episode of Conlang Critic and have had no trouble understanding the
advanced linguistics concepts, itās still useful to get a refresher on the basics. plus,
Iāll be putting my own Misalian twist on it so you wonāt get bored. in any episode of Conlang Critic, I start
with an overview of the language that the video will be about, explaining who made the
language, when, and why. I then spend the bulk of the video describing different specific
aspects of the languageās design, while sharing what I think about the different design
decisions. I then present a sample of what the language is like in practice, and then
conclude with my final thoughts and opinions. Lingwa de Planeta, or Lidepla for short, is
an international auxiliary language, or IAL, created by a team led by Dmitry Ivanov starting
in 2006, with the earliest version of the language published in 2010. my primary source
of information for this review is the official website lingwadeplaneta.info, which appears
to have been most recently updated in 2018. as an IAL, Lidepla was created to be a culturally
neutral language to be used for communication between people who otherwise wouldnāt have
a language in common. Lingwa de Planeta is part of the specialized subcategory of IALs
whose theoretical target audience is everyone around the world. when designing a global international auxiliary
language, there is a large number of things that need to be taken into consideration,
which I will explain as they come up in this review. what I care about most is how easy
the language would be to learn for people with different first languages. this lens is part of the reason why when I
critique IALs I have a tendency to focus on phonology more than other aspects of the language. phonology is the categorization of sounds
used in languages. a languageās phonology consists of two main parts: the phonemic inventory
and the phonotactics. a phonemic inventory is the set of phonemes which can be used to
form words, and phonotactics are the rules that determine how those phonemes can be put
together. letās talk about the inventory first. a phoneme is an abstract unit of sound used
in spoken language. the smallest meaningful difference there can be between two words
in the same language is replacing one phoneme with another. phonemes themselves are not sounds, but they
are distinguished by their āphonetic realizationsā, the sounds that appear at a surface level
when phonemes are used in words. a single phoneme can have multiple realizations, which
are called its āallophonesā. which allophone is used often depends on the surrounding context
of what other phonemes appear around it in a word, but itās also common for realizations
to vary from speaker to speaker. the set of phonemes that exist in a given
language is that languageās āphonemic inventoryā. itās entirely possible for
different phoneticians to come to different conclusions about what phonemes a language
has, because, like most things in nature, language is messy and often difficult to categorize. to present a phonemic inventory, itās handy
to organize phonemes into charts, sorted according to their most basic phonetic realizations,
like this chart which I made categorizing Lideplaās consonants. Lingwa de Planetaās consonants are: m n ng /Å/
p /pŹ°/ t /tŹ°/ ch /tŹ/ k /kŹ°/ b d j /dŹ/ g /É”/
f s sh /Ź/ h /x/ v z /dz/
w l r this chart contains slightly inaccurate information,
which to those familiar with the notation is transparently intended to make the chart
itself more compact. however, given that Iām about to spend a few minutes explaining how
these charts are meant to be read, hereās a more accurate version. see, it just doesnāt look as good this way.
thereās a lot more empty space. anyway, this chart lists Lideplaās consonant
phonemes. each phoneme is represented using both the way it is spelled in Lidepla and
with its representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet. the IPA, regulated by the
International Phonetic Association, is an international standard for phonemic and phonetic
transcription. since the same alphabet is used both for phonemic analysis and for phonetic
transcription, the two are distinguished by placing phonemic analysis between slashes
and phonetic transcription between square brackets. the columns of this chart represent āplace
of articulationā, and the rows represent āmanner of articulationā. a place of articulation
is where in the mouth a sound is produced. ālabialā means lips, āalveolarā means
the alveolar ridge, which is right behind the top front teeth, āpostalveolarā means
a little bit behind the alveolar ridge, and āvelarā means the velum, or soft palate,
the back of the roof of the mouth. in general, consonant phonemes involve two
āarticulatorsā, an active articulator and a passive articulator, which interact
in an āarticulatory gestureā to produce a sound. the primary active articulators used
in spoken languages are the lips (in ālabialā consonants), the tongue (in ālingualā
consonants), and the larynx (in ālaryngealā consonants). passive articulators are more numerous, and
as such theyāre usually what place of articulation categories on these charts are named after.
youāll notice that an exception on this chart is the labial column, which can technically
be divided further into ābilabialā, with both lips against each other, and ālabiodentalā,
with the bottom lip against the top teeth. youāll also notice that the <w> here is
listed in two columns, which we will get to. a manner of articulation is the way a sound
is produced. all the consonants in Lidepla are āpulmonic consonantsā, meaning that
they are produced by restricting the airflow from the lungs in specific ways. nasals, or ānasal stopsā, have the two
articulators contact while allowing sound to pass through the nasal cavity. plosives, or āstopsā, block the airflow
entirely, building up pressure at the place of articulation which produces a sound when
released. fricatives are produced by two articulators
coming very close together, bottlenecking the air into a specific turbulent path. affricates are consonants that start like
plosives but are released as fricatives. theyāre the Stops That Donāt! approximants have their articulators come
close together, but not close enough to make the airflow turbulent. both approximants in
Lidepla are special cases. /w/ is a ālabiovelar approximantā. itās pronounced with rounded
lips, so itās labial, and it is also pronounced with the body of the tongue approaching the
soft palate, so itās velar. since itās pronounced in two places of articulation at
once, it is said to be ācoarticulatedā. /l/ is an āalveolar lateral approximantā.
ālateralā means that the sound actually comes from the sides of the mouth. and then thereās ārhoticā, which is
a completely meaningless category. okay, thatās not entirely fair. ārhoticā means r-like
sound, the sorts of sounds that are represented in the Latin alphabet with the letter <r>.
Lideplaās rhotic consonant is what I like to call the āwhateverā rhotic, and weāre
gonna have to put a pin in that and come back to it later. so uh, one more thing about how to read this
consonant chart before I get into actually talking about this consonant inventory. youāll
notice that some of the manner of articulation categories cover two rows. in all of those
cases, the top row contains voiceless consonants, and the bottom row contains voiced consonants.
voicedness, or just āvoiceā, is a distinction made for weather or not the vocal cords vibrate
while pronouncing a sound. this act of vibrating your vocal cords is called āvoicingā. okay, I think thatās all the basics covered.
if you donāt mind, Iām gonna switch back to the more compact version of the chart now. there we are, much nicer. so, Lidepla does
a few things in its consonant inventory differently from other IALs. I do think the velar nasal,
/Å/, is a good feature to have, and I do like the way itās implemented. itās the
<ng> sound in English words like āthingā, and itās also rather common in Mandarin
Chinese. Lidepla vocabulary is derived from words from various commonly spoken languages,
so having a velar nasal in its inventory allows it to make words from languages like English
and Mandarin more recognizable. another thing I like is how the voicedness
distinction for the plosives was handled. the voiceless stops, /pŹ° tŹ° kŹ°/, are all
phonemically āaspiratedā. aspiration is essentially when you exhale a little bit after
a consonant is released. most major languages have at least two sets of plosives. languages
like French distinguish between stops with voicedness, with all stops being unaspirated.
languages like Mandarin distinguish between stops with aspiration, with all stops being
unvoiced. languages like Hindi distinguish between voicedness and aspiration separately. then thereās languages like English, which
distinguish between their two stop series with a combination of voicedness and aspiration.
voiceless stops in English, like in Lidepla, are both voiceless and aspirated. this is
easiest to notice by pointing out a context in English where they are not aspirated: the
k in ākeyā as aspirated, but the k in āskiā is unaspirated. the reason Lidepla copies English in this
way is that it works as a compromise between the different systems. when listening to someone
speak Lidepla, speakers of languages like French can easily pick out the voicedness
distinction, while speakers of languages like Mandarin can easily pick out the aspiration
distinction. now letās get back to the āwhatever rhoticā.
the letter <r> is strange. itās pronounced in a very wide variety of ways with very little
actually connecting them. nonetheless, most major languages have some sort of r-sound.
as a result, itās common for IALs to recommend that people learning the language just pronounce
the letter <r> however theyāre used to pronouncing it in their native language. Lidepla goes
one step further by not even recommending any specific pronunciation as the default.
I pronounced it like a trill, [r], when I was reading the chart, but following the actual
recommendations I probably should pronounce it as an Englishy approximant, [É»Ź·], since
thatās what Iām most comfortable with. the problem with the whatever rhotic is that
this wide variety of ways one letter can be pronounced means that itās likely to at
least sometimes be indistinguishable from at least one other phoneme. there are a few more things worth addressing,
which I think are best incorporated into... Whatās the Most Commonly Spoken Language
Whose Consonant Inventory Is Incompatible with That of This Particular International
Auxiliary Language? the show that exists to draw out the already
bloated phonology segments of Conlang Critic episodes to be even more unnecessarily long
than they were before. and now, hereās your lovely host, āList of languages by total
number of speakersā from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia! [more cheering] welcome, Lingwa de Planeta, itās great to
have you here on the show. I am talking to a language right now. if you donāt know
how this game works, the rules are very simple. Iāll be going through the consonant inventories
of the most common languages and seeing how they compare to your consonant inventory. for it to count as compatible, the natural
languageās inventory must have at least one consonant that can directly correspond
to each consonant in your inventory, within a fairly forgiving amount of acceptable variation.
all I am concerned with here is the consonant inventory itself, so I wonāt be looking
at vowels or phonotactics. if a languageās inventory is not compatible,
that means that for monolingual speakers of that language to learn to speak Lidepla, theyāll
need to teach themselves how to learn to pronounce at least one new unfamiliar consonant, something
that puts them at a distinct disadvantage before theyāve begun learning anything. so, Lingwa de Planeta, are you ready to play...
Whatās the Most Commonly Spoken Language Whose Consonant Inventory Is Incompatible
with That of This Particular International Auxiliary Language? English: 1.27 billion speakers. the velar fricative /x/ can be pronounced
as a more familiar glottal [h]. the rhotic is an approximant, and the voiced alveolar
affricate /dz/, if it could be considered a problem at all, can be pronounced as a fricative
[z] instead. fully compatible. Mandarin Chinese: 1.12 billion speakers. the voicedness distinction can easily become
an aspiration distinction, and the postalveolars and rhotic can all become retroflex. it almost
gets there. however, the Mandarin consonant inventory has no approximation for Lideplaās
voiced labiodental fricative. [losing theme] sorry, Lidepla, but Iām afraid your inventory
asks that Mandarin speakers learn to distinguish between [f] and [v], which- oh, whatās that? sorry folks, but it appears
that Iāve missed something. yes, itās clearly spelled out right here in the Lidepla
reference grammar, the phoneme /v/ is free to be pronounced as [w]. well, in that case,
Lidepla is in fact compatible with Mandarin Chinese after all! whew, that was a close one! Hindi: 637 million speakers. this oneās a near miss. the velar nasal
is marginal at best in Hindi, only occurring in consonant clusters, and [f] only appears
in loanwords. additionally, Hindi doesnāt distinguish between [v] and [w], having a
single labiodental approximant thatās somewhat like both. still, given that thatās accounted
for in Lidepla, marginally compatible. Spanish: 538 million speakers. for Spanish, you can kinda make it work, but
you need to make a lot of compromises. by necessity, the voiced stops have to become
Spanishās kinda-stop-kinda-fricative-kinda-approximant things, which is fine, I guess, and also you
have to use both the postalveolar fricative [Ź] and the dental fricative [Īø], both of
which are only found in some Spanish dialects, and even fewer speakers have both. and on
top of that, you still have to use the same thing for /v/ and /w/ if you donāt want
to introduce a completely new phonemic distinction. like, Iāll give it to you, Lidepla, but
Iām not happy about it. French: 277 million speakers. this is it. itās all come down to this.
will Lidepla succeed where Novial failed? [drumroll] nope! [losing theme] so, Iāll give it to
Lidepla that French speakers would be completely fine pronouncing affricates as stop-fricative
sequences, even though affricates are not in fact phonemic in French. however, the French
language has no good equivalent to Lideplaās velar fricative. the closest thing is the
French uvular rhotic, but like, thatās already the rhotic. this is the exact same problem that Novial
ran into the last time I did this gameshow segment. French speakers, if they want to
learn this language, will have to familiarize themselves with a new whispered guttural fricative. well, thatās kinda disappointing. oh well! in general, I think this consonant inventory
is decent. I like some of the choices Lidepla makes here, like how by design you never have
to distinguish anything by voicedness alone. and while as a whole there is room for improvement,
itās probably good enough. Lingwa de Planetaās vowels are: i, y /i/ u
e o a this is the five vowel system. you might know
it from languages like Spanish and Japanese. this is the most commonly used set of vowels
across different languages, and for an international auxiliary language there isnāt really any
reason to use anything else. vowels are arranged on charts like this according to their positions
in āvowel spaceā. the horizontal axis is where in the mouth the tongue is positioned,
and the vertical axis is how open the mouth is. additionally, the open vowel /a/ is usually
a ācentralā vowel, halfway between front and back. since in five vowel languages like
this one itās the only central vowel, this is shown by having it span across two columns
rather than giving it its own ācentralā column. but yeah, there really is not anything interesting
I can say about the five vowel system. if language was food, then the five vowel system
would be water. in addition to the inventory, a languageās
phonology also includes its phonotactics, the rules for how phonemes can be put together
to form words. a lot of auxiliary languages donāt define their phonotactics at all,
which is how you end up with words like rjienrlwey in Sambahsa. unfortunately, Lidepla also seems to have
this same problem. Lidepla words tend to be borrowed almost directly from source languages,
with little to no consideration being made for pronounceability. let me explain. spoken languages tend to group
phonemes into syllables. a syllable has some phoneme, typically a vowel, at its core, called
its ānucleusā, which can be proceeded with a set of consonants called its āonsetā
and followed by a set of consonants called its ācodaā. a languageās phonotactics
restrict what phonemes and sequences of phonemes are allowed in each position. in English, the velar nasal phoneme, /Å/,
only appears in the coda of syllables, in words like āwingā /wÉŖÅ/, āsongā
/sÉÅ/, and āconlangā /kÉnlƦÅ/. even though /Å/ is a perfectly normal English
phoneme, a syllable that starts with a velar nasal, like āngarfā /ÅÉĖɹf/, doesnāt
subjectively feel like an English word to native speakers, and as such untrained English
speakers will have to spend time becoming comfortable with putting phonemes in an unfamiliar
order before they are able to speak a language which allows a velar nasal in the onset of
a syllable. Lidepla, fortunately, had the foresight to
only allow the velar nasal at the ends of words, so this specifically is not a problem.
this isnāt just for the benefit of English speakers, mind you, as Mandarin Chinese has
the same coda-only restriction for its velar nasal. however, there is an analogous problem
that Lidepla did not have the foresight to avoid. in English, just like how /Å/ only appears
in the coda of syllables, the glottal fricative, /h/, only appears in the onset of syllables,
in words like āheartā /hÉĖɹt/, āhomeā /hoŹm/, and āhumanā /hjuĖmÉn/. but,
a syllable that ends with a glottal fricative, like āsplihā /splÉŖh/, once again, doesnāt
feel like an English word to native speakers. asking an English speaker to put an <h> sound
at the end of a syllable is asking them to spend time learning to get comfortable with
an unfamiliar way to use their speaking muscles. and yet, Lidepla seems to do this exact thing
in words like mah, kinah, and muh. now, many of you will be quick to point out that the
phoneme represented with the letter <h> in Lidepla is a velar fricative, not a glottal
fricative, and that a velar fricative does appear at the ends of English words like ālochā
/lÉx/ for some speakers. however, Iād argue that for most English speakers, this is either
asking them to learn to make a new sound that theyāre unfamiliar with, or asking them
to put a sound they are familiar with in an unfamiliar position. and itās not just about English speakers.
many common languages have phonotactics that are far more restrictive than English, and
for speakers of those languages, Lideplaās complete lack of restraint is a serious hurdle
that gets in the way of its goal of neutrality. in general, I donāt think Lidepla phonology
is bad. it couldāve taken a few more things into consideration, but as it stands, I think
it works for what itās going for. given that the vocabulary is derived from various
common languages, all the āproblemsā Iāve brought up are probably intentional features
meant to make the vocabulary more easily recognizable, which I can respect. orthography is the way a language is written.
for an international auxiliary language like Lidepla, this should be as boring as possible.
there is room for creativity in designing how a language writes things, but for an IAL,
clarity should be prioritized above all else. the Latin alphabet is the most commonly used
writing system, and itās used in a very wide variety of ways. itās common for different
languages to pronounce the same sequence of letters completely differently. when designing auxlangs, itās generally
understood that the best practice is to use the Latin alphabet more or less āphoneticallyā,
with everything pronounced the same way regardless of context. so, itās always possible to
unambiguously determine pronunciation from spelling alone. however, even if spelling-to-pronunciation
is simple and clear, that does not automatically make it possible to unambiguously determine
spelling from pronunciation. those sorts of ambiguous situations lead to inconsistency,
which leads to frustration. Lingwa de Planeta has a couple of these ambiguities
in its orthography. one thatās common for IALs is the way it uses the letter <x>. Lidepla
uses <x> for the consonant sequence /ks/, with a couple of extra rules allowing, but
not requiring, its pronunciation to be altered in some contexts. this, on its own, is fine.
it matches the way the letter <x> is used in plenty of languages that use the Latin
alphabet. however, there are several words where the
sequence /ks/ is spelled with <ks>, and from pronunciation alone you wouldnāt be able
to predict which words use <x> and which use <ks>. this, too, is fine. Novial had the same
exact problem. itās just a little bit of ambiguity that could be somewhat frustrating,
but it helps to preserve the origins of the words in question, so itās not that big
of a deal. the other ambiguous thing in Lidepla orthography
is the letter <y>. as you saw on the vowel chart, the vowel /i/ can be written with either
<i> or <y>. Lidepla uses <y> purely as an alternate way of writing /i/. neither letter
is ever used for the consonant [j]. I was prepared to point to this as another
example of something that could be frustrating but in the end helps make it more clear where
words come from, but Lidepla actually uses <y> in a way thatās more clever and creative
than that. but to explain it, Iāll first need to talk about stress. in many languages, but not all, words with
more than one syllable have at least one of their syllables emphasized more than the others.
this is the āstressed syllableā of that word. a stressed syllable can be higher pitch,
louder, longer, or some combination of these. while in some languages stress always follows
a specific predictable pattern, in others stress is a phonemic feature, a meaningful
distinction which can be used to differentiate between specific words. in English, stress
is the difference between the words āinsightā and āinciteā. anyway, in Lidepla, stress is a phonemic feature,
though I donāt think thereās any cases of it being the only difference between two
words. where the stress appears in a word is mostly predictable: the stress falls on
the vowel before the final consonant in the word, with special cases made for a few specific
suffixes and vowel-vowel sequences. however, there are exceptions, and these exceptions
are marked in the orthography in a way that I think is kinda clever. see, whenever the stress appears somewhere
that doesnāt follow that pattern, the stressed syllable is marked by doubling its vowel.
so, if ākafeeā simply must have its second syllable stressed to be understood, this is
indicated with a double <e>. now, letās take the stress rules and apply
them to a word like āheliumā. now, itās pretty obvious that the word for helium should
be helium, since thatās a widely used word internationally. so, put the stress on the
vowel before the last consonant, and you get heliuĢm! well, actually, -um is one of the
specific suffixes that gets a special case saying that itās never stressed, so the
stress moves one syllable over to heliĢum. this sounds a bit off, and in fact the consensus
across different languages is that the stress should go on the first syllable. so, we just
double that first vowel and get heelium! well, now it looks a bit off. so, should Lidepla
go with the option that looks right but sounds weird or the option that looks weird but sounds
right? or maybe there should be another special case for -ium, making the stress rules more
complicated. and this is where Lideplaās use of the letter
<y> comes in. even though <y> is pronounced the same as <i>, itās specifically never
stressed, so itās perfect for situations like this. just replace the <i> with a <y>
and you get something that doesnāt look awkward while still following an intuitive
stress pattern, all without needing to overcomplicate the general stress rules. this workaround is very clever and neat, which
is bad for an IAL. remember, the orthography should be boring and functional. this is too
interesting for its own good, and it gets in the way of clarity. I mean, just looking
at the way the letter <y> is used, it looks like itās being used as a consonant most
of the time. this looks like it should be pronounced like a two syllable [Ėxel.jum]
and not like a three syllable [Ėxe.li.um]. maybe that is what itās supposed to be,
and I just misinterpreted the reference grammar. I mean, if you look up videos of people speaking
Lidepla you can easily find multiple examples of people pronouncing the letter <y> as a
consonant. so, either the official documentation of the language wasnāt clear enough for
me to understand how the letter <y> is supposed to be pronounced, or this use of the letter
<y> is unintuitive. either way, itās not great. grammar is the underlying structure of a language.
where phonology and orthography are what determine a languageās surface-level aesthetic, grammar
is the backbone, the heart of what makes a language tick. when making a conlang, grammar is where a
conlanger has the most room for artistic expression. itās what can make a language truly unique,
and itās also the most difficult aspect to fully appreciate. for an international auxiliary language, grammar
can be the most difficult thing to get right, because there are multiple conflicting philosophies
regarding how an auxlang should work. itās commonly agreed that an auxlangās
grammar should be simple, elegant, and consistent. once youāve learned a few easy to understand
rules, a few months of dedicated memorization of pure vocabulary will be all that separate
you from full fluency. itās also commonly agreed that it should
be possible to say anything in an auxlang that you can say in your native language,
allowing, but not requiring, you to make any of the subtle distinctions that youāre accustomed
to. any text may be translated into and out of the auxlang without the loss of any information
along the way. these two goals both sound great, and itās
impossible to achieve them at the same time. the more things a grammar allows you to do,
the more complex that grammar must be, and vice versa. for that matter, itās also impossible to
actually fully achieve either goal separately. natural languages, as it turns out, are complicated,
and if a conlang were to actually capture the sum total of all grammatical distinctions
made across all natural languages, that conlang would be far too complex to ever be practically
used as an auxiliary language. on the other hand, natural languages, as it
turns out, are diverse, and whatās intuitive and simple to some will always seem arbitrary
and complex to others. this paradox is part of why I donāt think itās possible for
an international auxiliary language to actually be good. nonetheless, the design challenge of trying
to balance these conflicting goals can be an enticing one, and itās worthwhile to
examine and appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into trying to solve this paradox, even
if the result inevitably ends up as something that wouldnāt really work as a truly neutral
international language. Lideplaās angle is to favor elegance over
expressiveness. an easy thing to point out is the complete lack of a word for ātheā.
itās just not a thing that you can say. while in English, you can make a meaningful
distinction between āthe cats sleepā and ācats sleepā, in Lidepla, both sentences
are translated as ākotas somniā. the word ātheā is a definite article,
and while definite articles are relatively common, they arenāt universal, and to someone
who doesnāt speak a language that has them, the distinction can feel arbitrary and confusing.
I mean, how would you explain to someone who speaks a language without definite articles
what the word ātheā means? bonus points if you can also explain the difference between
ātheā and āthatā! some other common but not universal grammatical
distinctions exist in Lidepla entirely optionally. for example, the word ākotaā, in its most
basic form, does not contain any information about number. it could mean either ācatā
or ācatsā. but, you can specify plural using an optional plural suffix, with ākotasā,
and you can specify singular using an optional singular suffix, with ākota-geā, or by
just saying āun kotaā, which specifically means āone catā. additionally, the word ākotaā does not
contain any information about gender. while in English the basic form of a noun being
ungendered is completely normal, some languages have grammatical gender, which, side note,
isnāt the same thing as gender gender. grammatical gender is a system of classifying nouns into
mostly arbitrary categories that function differently. in Indo-European languages that have grammatical
gender, words for women and men are usually put into different noun categories, so those
specific grammatical genders are usually called āfeminineā and āmasculineā, respectively,
but one, thatās not the only way grammatical gender can work. the noun classes can be based
on literally anything, or nothing at all. and two, the feminine and masculine genders
in Indo-European languages have almost nothing to do with the gender genders theyāre named
after. in German, the actual literal word for āgirlā is grammatically neuter. itās almost completely arbitrary which words
belong in which class in different languages, with the only exception being that words for
things that can have gender genders generally, but not always, use the corresponding grammatical
genders. anyway, speakers of languages that have grammatical
gender are used to always specifying the genders of animals in all contexts, the same way speakers
of languages with grammatical number are used to always specifying weather or not thereās
more than one of something. so, if you want, Lidepla allows you you specify a female cat
with ākotinaā or a male cat with ākotoā. there are still some things that are perhaps
more strict than the pure design philosophy should have led to. the personal pronouns
in particular are somewhat arbitrarily more complex than necessary. the second person pronoun, āyuā, which
means... āyouā, is the only personal pronoun without grammatical number. first and third
person pronouns distinguish between singular and plural with completely separate roots,
which is weirdly inconsistent with how nouns work. I get how a first person distinction
between āmeā and āusā makes sense, but it makes much less sense in the third
person. by the way, in addition to third person singular
āliā and third person plural ātaā, thereās a few extra third person singular
pronouns with the specific gender and animacy meanings that English speakers are already
familiar with. thereās further special cases made for the
personal pronouns dealing with their possessive forms. you know, the thing English usually
does with the -ās suffix. in Lidepla, thereās an analogous -ney suffix thatās used for
the possessive forms of most nouns, which can be applied to these personal pronouns,
but then thereās also separate words that you can use instead. I think this system as a whole is fine? it
works, but it couldāve been more elegant than it actually is. now, Iād like to discuss how verbs in Lidepla
work, but first thereās something about this language that I havenāt brought up
yet. see, Lidepla was heavily inspired by the auxlang Novial. I made a video about Novial
like a year ago, and while the languages do have many significant differences, the most
clear and direct similarities between them can be found in their verbs. now, if youāve seen my video about Novial,
youāll know that I think Novialās verbs are overly complex, so itāll be fun to see
what changes Lidepla makes to the system. much like Novial, Lidepla marks different
tenses and aspects on verbs using a set of particles that go before verbs, with a handful
of things that use suffixes. unlike Novial, this system feels more refined and internally
consistent. thereās no doubling up with multiple verb forms with the same meaning. for example, in Novial, āsalā and āveā
are both used for the same future tense; they both mean the same thing, but in Lidepla,
āveā is used for the general future tense, as in āI will eatā, and āsalā is used
for the immediate future, as in āIām going to eatā or āIām about to eatā. while I do think there are still too many
of these particles, it is generally easier to get a hang of how they work in Lidepla
than it is in Novial. I think the best change is in the meaning of the root form: in Novial,
the basic form of a verb is used for the present tense, but in Lidepla, the basic form of a
verb contains no tense information. this little change makes it so that if you want, you donāt
have to worry about tense marking at all, which is a welcome feature. Lideplaās verb system connects directly
with its word derivation system, the system used for making new words out of existing
words. itās common for auxiliary languages to attempt to make deriving words a completely
regular process. consider in English the various ways to derive nouns from adjectives, even
though a noun that comes from an adjective usually has a completely predictable meaning. a common solution used in IALs is to have
all words of a certain part of speech end with a specific letter, then you can just
swap out that one letter to derive new words. this was popularized by Esperanto, where nouns
end with -o and adjectives end with -a. this sort of system works pretty good, with
the only problem being the restriction it puts on vocabulary. Novial does a similar
thing, but in a way that makes it easier to tell if a word is derived from another word
or not. Lidepla, somewhat expectedly, is similar to
Novial in this respect, using suffixes that clearly mark which words are not in their
root form. in general, nouns in Lidepla end with -a,
adjectives end with -e, and verbs end with -i, but there are exceptions to all three
of these trends. so, unlike in a language like Esperanto, you canāt necessarily determine
what part of speech a given word is just by looking at it; you have to know what the word
means first. however, as long as you are familiar with
a wordās root form, derivation is still relatively consistent. take, for example,
the process of turning a verb into a noun. most verbs end with -i. replacing -i with
-a will turn the verb into a noun. so, āreflektiā is reflect, and āreflektaā is reflection. but, since not all verbs end with -i, this
doesnāt always work. so, for verbs that donāt end with -i, you suffix -sa instead.
so, ājanā is know, and ājansaā is knowledge. then in addition, thereās other
suffixes for different types of nouns you could want to derive from a verb, summarized
in this table. now, while not being able to necessarily determine
what part of speech a word is right away can making parsing texts somewhat slower for beginners,
it has the benefit of allowing words to be more recognizable. Lingwa de Planeta is an āa posterioriā
auxiliary language. that means that its vocabulary, the set of all words that can appear in the
language, was based on existing natural languages, and not created from scratch. this is how
most international auxiliary languages create their vocabulary, and itās for a good reason.
if words are taken from common natural languages, then some people will have a chance of being
able to recognize and understand individual words, without needing to spend time learning
them. you might be able to immediately notice an
obvious problem with this. the point of an IAL is to be a culturally neutral language,
equally useful to everyone regardless of their native language. so then, if its vocabulary
is derived from specific natural languages, that gives a clear and measurable advantage
to speakers of those specific languages. this makes the language less neutral. a solution to this problem is to derive vocabulary
from a very wide variety of languages, and to calculate what the most cross-linguistically
recognizable word for any specific concept is. this is very difficult in practice, because
there are a lot of languages, and despite what you might have been led to believe, your
average linguist doesnāt have comprehensive knowledge of every single natural language. so, instead, a posteriori conlangs tend to
pick a set of specific languages as their sources, languages which are well documented,
widely spoken, and, ideally, representative of the global population. it is in the process
of selecting these source languages where most popular auxlangs run into the same specific
problem: Eurocentrism. broadly, Eurocentrism is the idea that European
culture is the default, and the assumption that things that are universal in Europe must
also be universal for humanity as a whole. in international auxiliary languages, Eurocentrism
most commonly manifests in a set of sources that overrepresent European languages. the reason IALs tend to do this is that the
most spoken European languages show a clear family resemblance to each other. youāre
probably familiar with the Romance languages, the family of languages descended from Latin.
thereās also the Germanic languages, including English and German. while the Germanic languages
are not descended from Latin (if they were theyād be Romance languages), Romance and
Germanic languages do have a common ancestor; the two language families are branches of
the larger Indo-European language macrofamily. while not all languages spoken in Europe belong
to the Indo-European language family, the most common ones do, and this common ancestry
makes it easy to find things these major Eurolangs have in common, which, if youāre using a
set of European languages as a sample meant to represent the whole world, will lead you
to assume that those common features are universal. so, if you want to pick a set of source languages
to derive words from without being Eurocentric, what can you do? letās welcome back our
old friend, List of languages by total number of speakers. this set of languages with over
45 million speakers has representatives from the worldās most significant language families. now, according to the official Lingwa de Planeta
website, Lideplaās source languages are the top ten most spoken languages. of course,
since the language started its development in 2006, we can probably expect that list
to be slightly different from this one. so, Dmitry, what are your source languages? well, thereās six European languages: English,
German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, and then thereās another four non-European
languages: āChineseā, Russian, Hindi, and Arabic. huh! it sure is interesting how much can change
in just fourteen years. I mean, wow, did Italian really have more speakers than Bengali, Indonesian,
Urdu, Swahili, Marathi, Telugu, Turkish, Yue Chinese, Tamil, Western Punjabi, Wu Chinese,
Korean, Vietnamese, Hausa, Javanese, and Egyptian Arabic as recently as 2006? why, thatās
literally unbelievable! regardless of if these really were the ten
most spoken languages at the time or not, how representative of different language families
are they collectively? of these ten source languages, eight are Indo-European,
of which there are four Romance languages, two Germanic languages, one Indo-Aryan language,
and one Slavic language. the other two non-Indo-European languages consist of one Chinese language
and one Semitic language. at the same time, massive language families like the Niger-Congo,
Austronesian, and Dravidian families are completely unrepresented. but to be fair to Lidepla, at the very least
it does use its non-European sources. Mandarin and Arabic words make up a significant portion
of the lexicon, which is more than I can say for the more explicitly Eurocentric auxlangs
out there. additionally, languages outside of the ten sources werenāt completely ignored,
as they were used when determining which words are more internationally recognizable. there are even cases where there is no consensus
among the source languages what a word should be, and so Lidepla uses a word from outside
of its primary sources. in general, Iām impressed with how diverse
Lidepla vocabulary is. compared to earlier IALs, itās definitely a step in the right
direction, and itās clear that a conscious effort was made to avoid the typical Eurocentric
bias, despite the dubious set of source languages. Iād like to specifically highlight the way
that words from Mandarin Chinese are incorporated. I spoke in the Sambahsa episode about how
loaning words from Chinese languages presents a challenge in auxlang design. thereās two
main reasons for this. first, although Chinese languages make up
one of the most spoken language families in the world, itās rare for words from Chinese
languages to be loaned into languages spoken outside of East Asia. second, when filtered
through an auxlangās phonology, it can be hard to tell that words in different languages
that do have the same Old Chinese ancestor are related. hereās one Lidepla word alongside its cognates
in several Chinese languages, as well as Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. as you can see, while
itās clear that as a set all these words share a common ancestor, thereās still a
large amount of variation among them. at first, it might appear as though Lidepla
finds a compromise between the different languages. in reality, itās more of a literal interpretation
of the Romanized spelling of the Mandarin word specifically. the letter <r> in Mandarin
is usually pronounced like [Ź], a very j-like sound. so, the Mandarin word äŗŗ /ŹÉnĖ§Ė„/
is loaned into Lidepla as ājenā /dŹen/. while this approach isnāt necessarily bad,
it does cause some strange problems dealing with Mandarin vowels specifically. hereās
another example word. here, the word is pretty consistently pronounced
either with [au] or [o], but Lidepla loans the Mandarin word literally, according to
its Latin spelling. so even though in Mandarin the word is pronounced /xÉŹĖØĖ©Ė¦/, in Lidepla
itās /xa.o/, ending with /o/, and not /u/. itās subtly different in a way thatās
just slightly annoying. one last thing Iād like to mention is how
Lidepla uses endonyms. when talking about a specific place, an āendonymā is the
name for that place used by the people who live there, whereas an āexonymā is a name
applied to that place by people outside of it. for an IAL to be truly neutral, I think
itās important for everyone to be able to refer to the place where they live by the
name they call it when talking to other people who live there. this same principle can apply
to names of people, cultures, and languages. however, using endonyms is often in direct
contradiction with the stated design goals of international auxiliary languages. itās
very common for a name imposed on a region by outsiders to be more internationally recognizable
than the native name for the region. in these cases, more often than not, youāll see auxlangs
default to using the more well known exonyms rather than the more culturally neutral endonyms. a simple test I use to see if an auxlang uses
endonyms or not is the āwhat do you call Germany?ā test, since Germany is a country
with a very large number of exonyms. Lidepla passes the āwhat do you call Germany?ā
test, as its word for Germany is āDoichlandā. of course, a language passing the āwhat
do you call Germany?ā test could mean that it only uses endonyms for European countries,
so thereās also the āwhat do you call Japan?ā test used for auxlangs that pass
the first test. and, once again, Lidepla passes. the word for Japan is āNiponā. in fact,
Lingwa de Planeta, as a rule, always uses endonyms, which is exactly what I think an
IAL should do. now, one thing about place names is that thereās
usually some other words you need that are related to them. at a bare minimum, youāll
want a word for a person from the place. dealing with endonyms, this leads to a dilemma. some
country names are derived from the names of people who live there, while some names for
groups of people are derived from names for the countries they live in. this inconsistency
can make learning the names of countries in a given language theoretically up to twice
as difficult. what Lidepla does is a pretty decent solution.
the word for a person from a country can always be derived from the name of the country itself
with the same -jen suffix, but names for cultures and languages separate from specific countries
are given their own separate words, even in cases where etymologically those names are
related to the names used for specific countries. so, on one hand, you wonāt be able to figure
out what the word for the English language is just by knowing the word for England, but
on the other hand, why should the English language be called something that means āEngland
languageā? itās spoken in a lot of other places too, after all. the following text is an excerpt from a Lingwa
de Planeta translation of An Encounter with an Interviewer by Mark Twain. Kwesta. Kwel es yur yash?
Jawaba. Shi-nin yar, in mes-sit. K. Ver ku? Me wud dumi, ke es trishi-pet o
trishi-sit yar. Wo yu jamni? J. In Misuri.
K. Wen yu begin-te skribi? J. In yar 1836.
K. Komo se mog bi, si yu es sol shi-nin-yar-ney nau?
J. Me bu jan. Ver, se sembli idyen ajibe. K. Ajibe hi. Kwel zuy merkival jen yu gwo
miti in yur jiva? J. Aaron Bur.
K. Bat yu bu mog-te miti Aaron Bur, si yu es sol shi-nin-yar-ney...
J. Wel, si yu jan om me pyu kem me selfa, dan way yu kwesti me? all in all, Lingwa de Planeta exceeded my
expectations. I was ready for this to be yet another boring auxlang, but it has a few interesting
ideas and it does a few things very well. its biggest weaknesses are the cases where
it relies too heavily on its predecessorsā ideas rather than explore its own identity.
nearly every complaint I have about Lidepla can be traced back to something that was in
Novial, and I thought Novial was kinda okay. Lidepla makes an active effort to avoid the
issue of Eurocentrism found in all of its most popular competitors, and that alone puts
it ahead of the curve. yet, it still fails to quite be something thatās a truly neutral
language of the entire planet. is Lidepla the language that finally solved
the impossible puzzle of designing a good IAL? no, not by a long shot. it does better
than average, but the bar is very, very low. Lidepla did its best, and its best is just
okay. however, a language that improves on Lideplaās
ideas to the extent that Lidepla improved on Novial might just have a chance of being
the first international auxiliary language thatās better than just okay. thanks for watching, and Iāll see you next
time, where Iāll be reviewing Viossa. and by the way, if this was your first episode
of Conlang Critic, thanks for sticking around this long! itās people like you who have
made me able to believe that I can become a full-fledged professional youtuber in the
near future. if youāre at all interested in learning more about conlangs, I highly
recommend the series The Art of Language Invention, created by David J. Peterson, the guy who
made the languages in Game of Thrones. if you liked this video, [struggling to say
it] be sure to- s-smash th- sh-share it, mmmmmm support- support, th- the, P-Patreon, b-bell,
notification? [unintelligible babbling] DISTORTED VOICE: Engage. Interact. Promote
the Content. Consume. Sacrifice. You must appease the Gorithm. Like. Comment. Subscribe.
Like. Comment. Subscribe. Like. Comment. Subsc- VoĢtgil! VoĢtgil!
o tawa waso! o pali e ale!
sina ken, tawa mi! mi ken kute e
kalama sina tan insa pilin mi!
More information on r/lingwadeplaneta
Yay
Very interesting. Sadly, singular "ta" third personal pronoun is mixed with plural "li" third personal pronoun :-(
http://www.lingwadeplaneta.info/en/anglegram.shtml#pronounsandrelatedwords
can't believe that i learn about his new video from reddit and not from youtube notifications