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 new international auxiliary language, Novial. the international auxiliary language is a
popular genre of conlang, and Iām pretty sure that thereās never been a good one.
Iāve looked at IAL after IAL on this show, but every single one Iāve seen is flawed
in some way that prevents it from being good. the bar is so low that I was fine claiming
Lingua Franca Nova to be the least bad one Iāve looked at by default, even though itās
got most of the same problems as all the others. I should be clear here that when I say āinternational
auxiliary languageā or āIALā, Iām talking about a specific subset of international
languages, one even more specific than the clunky name āinternational auxiliary languageā
suggests. for my purposes, āIALā specifically refers
to a āglobal international auxiliary languageā, a language designed to be used for communication
between people who otherwise wouldnāt have a language in common regardless of where the
given people are from. this is a specific type of auxlang, which is a specific type
of interlang, which is a specific type of conlang. I bring all of this up because in the past
Iāve been inconsistent with terminology, referring to all languages that are even remotely
international as āinterlangsā regardless of what goals they have, giving the impression
that I for some reason think that all international languages are trying to be IALs. this is part
of why for Season Three I am no longer ranking conlangs against each other, and from the
feedback I got on the Dothraki episode it seems like youāre mostly good with that
change. anyway, thatās enough preamble. whatās
Novial? Novial is an IAL first proposed in 1928 in
the book An International Language by the late Otto Jespersen, whose surname sounds
like an alien doing a very bad job of convincing you of their humanity. Novial was created in direct response to the
various failed attempts to implement an IAL that came previously, notably VolapuĢk, Esperanto,
Ido, and even some languages I havenāt made videos about yet like Idiom Neutral, Latin
Without Inflections, and Interlingue, a language which is completely different from Interlingua
I promise. in An International Language, Otto goes through
the criticisms that he had for each of these conlangs, making him some sort of, yes, āPerson
Who Critiques Constructed Languagesā or something. he felt that much of the reason
none of these languages were successful was because they all had flaws that could be,
quote, ājustly and severely criticized by competent authoritiesā. Otto certainly talked a lot of smack, but
does his āNew International Auxiliary Languageā succeed where other attempts failed? Novialās consonants are: unlike some other IAL inventories Iāve seen,
I can understand why this is what it is. Novial prioritizes recognizability above pronounceability,
but still tries to find some balance between the two. itās clear that a lot of thought
was put into this set of consonants. now you might notice that two of the phonemes
on this chart are actually the same thing. the voiceless postalveolar affricate and the
voiceless postalveolar fricative are completely interchangeable in Novial. so why are they
two separate phonemes written in two distinct ways? well, the reason why has more to do
with orthography than phonology, so Iāll have to come back to that later, but for now
just know that youāre allowed to make the distinction if you want, but if you donāt
want to then itās fine. anyway, time for everyoneās favorite segment, What's the Most Commonly Spoken Language Whose
Consonant Inventory Is Incompatible with That of This Particular International Auxiliary
Language? the only segment of a conlang review series
dedicated to checking exactly who in the world would be able to pronounce the words in a
given IAL without needing to learn any new consonants! letās give it up for your host,
the Wikipedia article āList of languages by total number of speakersā! welcome to the showvial, Novial. now, the
rules are simple. weāll just go through every language on the Wikipedia article āList
of languages by total number of speakersā until we find the most commonly spoken language
that doesnāt have at least one sound that can directly correspond to each of the consonants
in your inventory. they donāt need to be perfect matches for every sound, just close
enough. if a language isnāt compatible, that means monolingual speakers of that language
would be forced to learn how to make at least one new sound in order to be able to speak
you. so, Novial, are you ready to play... What's the Most Commonly Spoken Language Whose
Consonant Inventory Is Incompatible with That of This Particular International Auxiliary
Language? English, 1.13 billion speakers. fully compatible. Mandarin Chinese, 1.12 billion speakers. makes
no distinction between voiced and voiceless fricatives, but can approximate /v/ with a
glide. compatible. Hindi, 615 million speakers. the sound /f/
is rare outside of loanwords, but perfectly fine being here. fully compatible. Spanish, 534 million speakers. somewhat of
a stretch. [b] and [Ī²] are allophones of the same phoneme in Spanish, so thereās
a risk of those being confused for each other, and similarly [ÉŹ] could be confused with
[iĢÆ]. compatible with an asterisk. French, 280 million speakers. this was specifically
cited as one of the āprincipal languagesā that contributed to Novialās design. and
its inventory... lacks any good equivalent to Novialās glottal
fricative. better luck next time, Novial! now, to be
fair, /h/ isnāt the hardest sound to learn how to make. itās literally just exhaling.
however, for a monolingual speaker of a language without this sound, being able to perceive
it as a meaningful sound can be very challenging. the fact that Otto didnāt even remark on
this challenge for French speakers learning Novial was quite the blunder on his behalf. and besides /h/, as you saw, the best approximation
Spanish speakers have for the voiced affricate isnāt actually very good. these are the
two sounds in this consonant inventory that I think shouldnāt be here. before moving on, I should acknowledge the
rhotic. itās specified as being ideally a trill, /r/, which makes sense because thatās
the most common rhotic sound. while I could go without it, it makes sense having it for
recognizability. Novialās vowels are: do I have to talk about the five vowel system
again? this is the most sensible vowel system for an IAL to use, and thereās not really
any reason to use anything else, unless you wanna go for a three vowel system. does Novial have diphthongs? technically no,
but there are plenty of words with consecutive vowels, and those are allowed to be pronounced
as diphthongs if you want. thereās also the particle mey which ends with a glide, which is for all intents and purposes the
same thing as a diphthong. Novialās phonotactics are never explicitly
defined in any of Otto Jespersenās books. just like with the segmental phonology, recognizability
seems to have been prioritized here above pronounceability, but at the very least there
seems to have been more care put into it than, say, Esperanto. while thereās nothing as
baffling as scii, words like svabre and pseudonimi donāt exactly roll off the tongue either. so. what is up with the two distinct but not
really distinct voiceless postalveolar sounds? well, this came as the result of Otto not
being able to make up his mind about weather Novialās hush consonant should be written
with <ch> or <sh>. clearly a distinction shouldnāt be made between the sounds /tŹ/ and /Ź/,
but how can you best write something that intuitively can be pronounced both ways? there is a correct answer to this, the digraph
<ch>. <ch> is used for both sounds across different languages, so if you want one thing
that intuitively can be read as both sounds, <ch> is the best option. Otto, however, clearly
didnāt see it this way, and instead decided not to decide and just made it so that <ch>
and <sh> both represented the same sound, but, and this is the kicker, speakers are
allowed to pronounce them differently if they want. this is amusingly spun as a positive for Novial.
quote, āIt is perhaps fortunate that there are some points in which we can allow each
individuality a full scope without any danger for mutual understanding.ā oh, Otto. anyway, besides that, everything else is spelled
unambiguously. well, almost everything. see, see, thereās also the letter <x>, which is used
for the sequence /ks/ or its voiced equivalent /ɔz/ in free variation. there are, however,
some words that write this sequence with <ks> instead, like aksidente and vaksine. another quirk of the Latin alphabetās use
in natural languages gleefully borrowed into Novial is <qu> used for the sequence /kuĢÆ/.
this use of the letters <x> and <q> is somewhat common for IALs, since it helps to preserve
the aesthetics of many words. however, I canāt help but wonder if this is truly necessary.
after all, Indonesian gets along just fine spelling words like ĆØkskomunikasi with <ks>
and words like kualitas with <ku>. in general, however, the inconsistencies of
Novialās orthography are harmless. while a fully phonetic writing system would of course
be preferred, given Novialās goal of recognizability I completely understand why one wouldnāt
be used. texts in Novial appear more natural, for what itās worth, than the same texts
written phonetically. and besides, itās still far more consistent than most languages that
use the Latin alphabet. I mean, itās not like it uses the letter <c> as a third, unpredictable
way of writing the sound /k/ as a spelling reform proposed six years later or anythOTTO! why would you do that, Otto? you spent like
sixteen hundred words deliberating what the best way to handle the letter <c> would be,
and you came to the right conclusion! yeah, of course people who like your language arenāt
going to want to adapt your spelling reform, itās not good! itās a bad spelling reform,
Otto! it makes spellings worse, the opposite of what a spelling reform is supposed to do!
ugh! Novialās grammar is, surprise surprise,
designed to be simpler and more regular than most natural languages. there is also a large
amount of room for variation in many things, presumably so that you can speak Novial in
a way more analogous to your first language. for example, the default word order is subject-verb-object.
because of this, the object of a sentence doesnāt need to be marked for the accusative
case; word order alone is enough to indicate this. however, if you want to use a different
word order that would require the object of a sentence to be marked, thereās a completely
optional accusative suffix that you can apply if you want. nouns are generally marked for number with
a consonant suffix in the plural, but a noun in its most basic uninflected form
has indefinite number, so the vowel e which usually appears on nouns can be interpreted
as a singular suffix. this system, however, is further complicated by the way Novial handles
gender. nouns in the singular have different suffixes
depending on gender. the suffix -e is applied for singular nouns in most situations, but
the feminine -a and masculine -o suffixes may be applied in cases where specifying gender
is necessary, mirroring the grammatical gender distinction in most Romance languages. it
is then this vowel that has the plural suffix added to it. this, by the way, is the ideal way to handle
gender in an IAL. you donāt have to specify gender, but when you want to, no gender is
treated as the default. thatās literally all I ask for, a system where itās possible
to talk about people without mentioning gender, and where women arenāt considered to be
a type of man. the bar is practically underground and yet IALs like Esperanto manage to dig
under it anyway. in addition to the gendered suffixes, thereās
also the suffix -um, which Otto describes as a neuter suffix, allegedly used for non-living
things, but itās pretty inconsistent. I mean, Iām fairly certain that libre counts
as something thatās, quote, āgenerally rendered in English by means of a āthingā
or a circumscription with āwhat isāā, but itās not *librum. anyway, in addition to number and the optional
marking of the accusative, nouns can also be marked for the genitive case with another
consonant suffix. this gender and case information all cannot
be indicated without also specifying number, making that indefinite number form feel more
like an afterthought than a fully realized feature of the language. adjectives end with the vowel suffix -i and
go before nouns. this suffix is allowed to be, and often is, dropped as long as it isnāt
ambiguous and still pronounceable. so while fasili will sometimes be shortened fasil,
simpli always keeps its suffix as an adjective. comparative and superlative forms of adjectives
use the particles plu and maxim. likewise, contrastive and sublative forms use the particles
min and minim. additionally, the equative uses the particle tam. all of these when used
to make comparisons use the preposition kam. so, plu boni kam means ābetter thanā,
tam boni kam means āas good asā, min boni kam means āless good thanā, maxim boni
means ābestā, and minim boni means āleast goodā. adjectives can be formed into nouns by replacing
the -i ending with the appropriate noun suffix. adverbs are derived from adjectives with a
consonant suffix, turning -i into -im. there are also various suffixes for more specific
types of adverbs, such as -grad, roughly meaning āextentā, so from alti comes altigrad. verbs in Novial are mostly handled using particles,
on top of a small set of suffixes. thereās a lot of stuff going on here. so
first off, the most obvious thing that jumps out right away is how Englishy this system
is. almost every single one of these is loaned directly from English. this isnāt necessarily
a bad choice, to be fair, as verbs tend to be learned from scratch anyway. whatās more
important is how the system functions underlyingly which oops is super Englishy again. on one hand, I think doing all this stuff
with particles instead of affixes was a good move. while not all of the source languages
use particles over verb conjugation in this way, itās generally easier to move from
synthetic to isolating than vice versa. on the other hand, though, thereās no consistency
with which forms get suffixes and which get particles besides just matching what English
does. like, the two participles get suffixes, admittedly
the only Romance-derived forms in the conjugation table, which happen to correspond with English
-ing and -ed, but then the infinitive takes the particle tu, like exactly the same one
it does in English and closely related Germanic languages. the future tense, typically marked
with sal can also use the completely separate particle ve, and thereās virtually no reason
to do that other than to imitate something like a shall/will distinction. most glaringly, the simple past has two different
verb forms with exactly the same meaning. itās the only tense in Novial that uses
a suffix and coincidentally the only one in English too. and yes, both of these forms
are directly derived from English even though just one wouldāve certainly sufficed. but then that suffix does more than just the
simple past tense. the future and perfect particles can both be modified with it to
form more complex past tenses. and of course on top of that you can stack
ha with other tenses to form future perfect and conditional perfect, again functioning
exactly the same as English. and this isnāt even mentioning the two passives!
oh, did I mention? Novial has two entire passive voices! despite being an auxlang, Novial found
it necessary to bake in a distinction between āpassive of beingā and āpassive of becomingā. for the normal passive, the āpassive of
beingā, the verb es is used along with the passive participle. sure, fine. but then the
other passive voice, the āpassive of becomingā, uses the particle bli but not the passive
participle. it works just like all the other particles,
including how the past tense is marked by giving it a suffix instead of the actual verb.
like, okay, I get why you might want to distinguish between these things, the change of state
as opposed to the state itself. and sure, itās a distinction that some languages do
make, but like, come on, wasnāt this verb system already complicated enough? somehow more complicated than the verbs is
Novialās expansive suffix system for derivation. like most other things, itās designed with
recognizability in mind over ease of use. so even though nouns end with -e by default,
nouns derived from verbs end with -o instead, sometimes. and of course thereās the suffix -iere,
which borrowed from Romance languages somehow turns an apple into an apple tree but also
the number one million into a millionaire. and then obviously thereās two distinct
and equivalent suffixes that turn a noun into a verb meaning āto turn intoā whatever,
another inconsistency borrowed because Otto just didnāt want to choose. as youāve surely gathered, Novial is just
as Eurocentric as every other major international auxiliary language. this is to be expected.
when aiming for maximum recognizability, itās a lot easier to just assume that European
languages are representative of the whole world than it would be to actually try to
figure out what the most recognizable words for things really are. I mean, actually looking
up how to say things in various common languages to determine what the most recognizable word
would be is a time-consuming process now, in a time when you can just ask a computer
to tell you stuff. imagine how hard it wouldāve been to do that a century ago! Novialās main focus is on the languages
most used in international discourse at the time: English, French, and German. additionally,
other languages were examined to help calculate what the most internationally recognizable
word for something would be. well, in Europe at least, but you get the idea. the specific
extra languages used were Spanish, Russian, Italian, and uh... āScandinavianā? I assume that thatās referring to just,
the North Germanic family of languages collectively, as though they were a singular language. it
sorta makes sense, seeingās how they form a sort of dialect continuum, but it is still
weird seeing one of the source languages be something that isnāt actually a single language. anyway, all seven of the source languages
are Indo-European, and of those, three are Germanic and three are Romance, leaving Russian
as the sole representative of all languages outside of those two families. the end result
is that Novialās vocabulary is pretty much entirely Romance and Germanic, slightly more
homogeneous than Esperantoās mix of Romance, Germanic, and Slavic. this is probably not
actually that big of a deal, but a bit more diversity wouldāve been nice, you know? that aside, if you look at specific words
in Novial and how they compare to the source languages, youāll see that wherever thereās a clear
consensus among them Novial of course has no problem, but whenever there isnāt one
clear best word for something, the default tends to be Romance rather than Germanic.
boni in particular there I think wasnāt the best choice, since the Germanic languages
here seem to be more in agreement than the Romance languages. something like gudi wouldāve
been better in my opinion. hereās a pronoun table. pronouns in general are handled exactly the
same as nouns, including the genitive suffix and the use of the gender suffixes for the
third person pronouns. those third person pronouns, by the way, are handled as though
they were the noun forms of the definite article li. the one exception to this consistency
is the first person plural pronoun, which is nus instead of *mes, which is justified
because āusā isnāt really the same exact thing as just more than one āmeā. might as well talk about numbers. numbers up to ten have basic names, as usual,
then thereās a regular -anti suffix for multiples of ten. thereās also some suffixes
for different forms of each number, including some I didnāt bother to put on this chart.
that āgroupā column there is for referring to a collection of a specific magnitude, like
what āduoā and ātrioā normally mean in English. for numbers between ten and a hundred, you
just say the word for the multiple of ten then the word for the ones digit, hyphenating
the two unless itās less than twenty for some reason. for larger orders of magnitude, the word for
the specific power of ten is used as a suffix, and everything else is still hyphenated. for the powers of ten themselves, Novial opts
for the long scale, with bilione meaning a million million instead of a thousand million. now, the use of the long scale makes sense.
itās a more elegant system than the short scale, and itās used by many languages,
sometimes including English. however, the fact that any variation at all exists for
what the number āone billionā means makes it hard for me to recommend actually using
either system for an IAL. instead, what I think an IAL should do is adapt the SI prefixes,
at the very least for numbers beyond a million, since theyāre both more consistent and more
international. of course, this is irrelevant because objectively speaking base ten is just
horrible and any language that wants to be viable sh one more thing to check is how Novial does
on the āwhat do you call Germanyā test. names of places are something where there
really is a good reason to prefer one language over all others, namely the language spoken
in that place. Germany is called a lot of things, but in German itās called Deutschland.
if an international auxiliary language calls Germany something that doesnāt sound like
Deutschland, it fails the āwhat do you call Germanyā test. so how does Novial do? well, I guess todayās just not your day,
Novial! the following is an excerpt from An International
Language by Otto Jespersen, provided as the first specimen in the bookās final section.
itās a translation of a passage from earlier in the same book. Un objetione kel bli ofte fa konter konstruktet
lingues es ke les pove nulitem es tam boni kam li natur-lingues. Es ver ke novial non
es tam richi kam anglum, non tam eleganti kam fransum, non tam vigorosi kam germanum,
non tam beli kam italianum, non tam nuansosi kam rusum, non tam hemali kam nusen patriali
lingue. Ma merka bonim, ke omni ti boni qualesos, kel on prisa e lauda in li nationali lingues,
bli nur trova kand indijenes parla o skripte les. all in all, while Novial is certainly an improvement
over its contemporaries, it still falls short of being a truly universally useful auxlang.
however, keeping within its actual intended scope, and not extrapolating to our modern
far more interconnected world, Novial mostly accomplishes what it set out to do. anything
I could point to and call āneedless complexityā is only there so that Novial can better suit
its needs of translating the nuances of natural languages fairly losslessly. so even though Novial doesnāt address all
of my problems with the Eurocentric IAL as a concept, it does a decent enough job of
being a Eurocentric IAL. I may not like it, but I understand it. and hey, being understood
is exactly what Novial wanted. thanks for watching, and Iāll see you next
time, wwwwwwwwwwww wwwwhere Iāll be reviewing The IS Language.
Unfortunately there is a serious problem with the video. I have tried viewing it from here with two different browsers and directly on YouTube. It always freezes at about 7:43 or 7:46. Too bad, because I have always enjoyed jan Misali's Conlang Critic videos, even though I have often disagreed with him regarding the particulars of various conIALs.