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 polysynthetic Esperanto, Poliespo. like a lot of conlangs Iāve reviewed, I
first heard about Poliespo when people started requesting it. itās most likely that this
video is your introduction to Poliespo as well, and for that I am deeply sorry. finding detailed information about this language
is difficult, but everything I could find pointed me to one clear conclusion: this is
the worst conlang I have ever heard of, and I have to see more of it. the official documentation for Poliespo was,
to my knowledge, exclusively released in Esperanto, and the only copy of that documentation I
could find online literally has holes in it. even if it was a perfect digitization, the
formatting is very frustrating to read. I was able to get some help from JoeyJoJo on
Discord translating the most important parts, but I still had to suffer through the original
Esperanto to get some more minor details. needless to say, researching this language
was a nightmare. another useful resource is an archive of an
email conversation from 1993, which also appears to be the primary source for the Wikipedia
article about Poliespo. Poliespo is an international auxiliary language,
I think, created by Billy Ray Waldon, also known as Nvwtohiyada Idehesdi Sequoyah. itās
a polysynthetic combination of Esperanto and Cherokee, and Billy claims that learning it
is āyour golden opportunity to acquire a Native American spiritā, a phrase with some
troublingly racist implications. oh, and get this, if you can get someone else
to join the Poliespo organization, which exists, youāll automatically get 20% of their membership
dues AND 20% of all money they give to the organization over their lifetime. get the
Fundamentals of Poliespo now for only twenty Swiss Francs! and uh. there is one other thing about this
languageās background that it would be irresponsible not to mention. serious violence mention content
warning coming up, so if you want to you can skip to the timecode on screen. Billy Ray Waldon, Poliespoās creator, is
currently on death row for several violent crimes, including three murders. this is,
obviously, horrifying, and Iām not trying to make light of it or anything, but it is
however an important bit of context because, if the copyright dates on the Poliespo documentation
are to be believed, his crime spree happened before he created the language. moving on, Poliespoās consonants are: m
n mĢ /Ź°Ģm/
nĢ /Ź°Ģn/ p
/pŹ·/ t
c /ts/ Ä /tŹ/
k /Ź/
b d
Ä /dŹ/ g /É”/
bĢ /Ź°Ģb/ kĢ /Ź°Ģk/
f tĢ /Īø/
s Å /Ź/
y /Ƨ/ Ą /x/
h v
/Ć°/ z
ĵ /Ź/ Å /w/
l j
r so, first things first, some of these are
supposed to be nasally preaspirated. I am definitely pronouncing them incorrectly. anyway, this is a lot. I donāt even know
where to begin. there are just so many bad decisions on display here itās almost incredible. I guess I could start by just explaining what
exactly it is that youāre looking at here. since Poliespo is based on Esperanto, its
inventory is an extension of Esperantoās inventory, with sounds added to it allegedly
so it can accommodate the new Cherokee vocabulary. now, for an IAL, I think Esperantoās inventory
is already a bad start. the three way /k x h/ distinction is especially bad for an international
language. the thing is, while Iām far from qualified
to speak authoritatively about Cherokee phonology, none of the descriptions of Cherokee I could
find provided any explanation for why exactly all of these new phonemes are here. like, hereās Wikipediaās chart of Cherokee
consonants. some of the most distinctive things about this inventory are the complete lack
of labial plosives, the lateral affricates, and the labiovelar plosive. Poliespo doesnāt include any of these things.
in fact, it adds a whole new labial plosive! this consonant as far as I can tell has no
reason for being here like, at all. Iām pretty sure that itās in some way from Cherokee
/kŹ·/, and those preaspirated phonemes are from something that specifically happens in
Oklahoman Cherokee, but everything else? no idea. speaking of no idea, thereās also two more
letters that are supposed to be phonemic consonants, specifically /kts/ and /ɔdz/. Billy specifically says that these are pronounced
as one consonant, but what exactly thatās supposed to mean is unclear. I donāt think we have to do whatever that
gameshow thing was called this time, right? Iāve seen a couple of people suggest that
when an auxlangās inventory is incompatible with English, I should do the opposite thing,
where I try to find the most common language with a compatible consonant inventory. given
that PHOIBLE claims that a preaspirated bilabial nasal exists in approximately no languages,
let alone a nasally preaspirated bilabial nasal, I think itās fair to say that this
isnāt a very newcomer friendly inventory. well, you know what they say about when you
canāt say something nice. Poliespoās vowels are: i
Ä /ÉŖ/ u
e x /É/
q /É/ o
ā±„ /Ʀ/ a
w /É/ that vowel written with q there is defined
in the IPA with that reverse epsilon letter, but itās then called the vowel specifically
the American English pronunciations of words like āgirlā, āshirtā, and āfirā.
since he specified American English, itās probably actually supposed to be more like
[É] than [É]. anyway, each of these ten oral vowels comes
with a corresponding nasal vowel, and also thereās phonemic tone? I guess? the way
tone works is explained very poorly, and I canāt confidently say anything about it
other than that it exists. I think thereās three phonemic tones, but Iām not sure. itās just... I seriously donāt have the
words to describe this. this is supposed to be an international auxiliary language, right?
I am interpreting āworld languageā correctly to mean ālanguage for the entire worldā
and not ālanguage that exists in the worldā, right? the conlangers who discussed this language
casually in the middle of a conversation about language acquisition in 1993 didnāt completely
misrepresent what itās trying to do, did they? [sigh] okay, so I guess to be fair, one of
the main things Poliespo is trying to do is make it possible to communicate more quickly
than in most natural languages, and for that specific goal it makes sense to have a larger
inventory. that said, this isnāt a particularly good
large inventory. aesthetically, itās all over the place. I made fun of Sambahsa, but
Sambahsa knew what it was trying to do. Poliespoās inventory looks like Billy just threw in everything
he could pronounce and called it a day. itās straight up bad design. easily the worst Iāve
seen. ughhhh the orthography though. much like the inventory, the orthography uses
Esperanto as a starting point, which for the record is not a good starting point. h-circumflex
is horrible. as for how the new things are handled, well, itās definitely not ideal. the preaspirated consonants are written with
a breve diacritic, Esperantoās wild use of the circumflex is extended to include t-circumflex
for /Īø/ and z-circumflex for /kts/, which as already mentioned has z-breve for /É”dz/
to go with it. and thatās far from the worst stuff here.
before even getting to the vowels, letās talk about the labiolabial stop and the voiced
dental fricative. these two phonemes are written as two overlapping
letters, /pŹ·/ with p-w, and /Ć°/ with t-v. this method for creating new letters makes
a lot of sense on a typewriter and in no other context. even if it was possible for me to
type these on my modern computer in my modern word processor, the way these look is just
so bad. itās so hard to tell what youāre even looking at for either of them. and the thing is, itās not like typewriter-compatibility
was Billyās top priority or anything, because you can tell in the document that he couldnāt
type most of the diacritics and had to write them over the letters by hand. so whatās
even the point of these? oh, and I almost went right past the glottal
stop! glottal stops are indeed phonemic in Poliespo, but theyāre also completely unwritten.
why? whatās the point? and then thereās the vowels. i-breve and
a-slash are... okay? I guess? I mean, Iām okay with them in comparison to everything
else, because this is where most of the ācleverā reuse of unused letters comes in. I basically skipped right over y for /Ƨ/,
but thereās also x for /É/, q for /É/, and w for /É/. I think I get where this idea
is from. when Cherokee is written in the Latin alphabet, its nasal vowel is written with
the letter v. I actually think thatās a good solution, <v> was historically a vowel
letter, after all, and Cherokee has no use for it as a consonant. this, however, isnāt that. itās a random
remapping of unused letters just because theyāre available. itās garbage. and this still
isnāt the most baffling feature of Poliespo orthography. so, Poliespoās vowels can be nasalized,
which is indicated with a circumflex. there is, however, an exception: nasal schwa isnāt
written with x-circumflex. thatās the nasal vowel in Cherokee written with <v>, so it
makes sense that it would be counted as its own thing in Poliespo. in Poliespo, nasal
schwa /ÉĢ/ is written, I kid you not, with the number two, because the number two looks
kinda like a nose. oh yeah, and remember how this language has
poorly described phonemic tone? well, rising tone is written by putting an acute on whatever
vowel, and the other tones which exist just straight up arenāt written. it does apparently
matter for grammar things what tones vowels have, but you have no way of knowing what
tone youāre supposed to use for any vowel if it isnāt rising tone. this orthography... is bad. itās transparently
inaccessible, infuriatingly unintuitive, and worst of all, very very ugly. looking at Poliespo
text gives me a headache. itās like it was specifically designed with me specifically
in mind, with the intention of using the Latin alphabet in a way thatās as disgusting as
possible to me personally. since Poliespo is supposed to be a combination
of Esperanto and Cherokee, I was excited to see what cool Cherokee words would be added
to the core vocabulary. I heard tales of a focus on sound symbolism, and the possibility
for Poliespo to function as a pan-Iroquoian language. disappointingly, Poliespo only has two new
roots directly from Cherokee. the Cherokee influence is there, just not in the vocabulary.
nearly everything else is directly from Esperanto. āosijoā replaces āsalutonā as the
basic greeting, and this is directly from the Cherokee word for hello, āį£įį²ā
(osiyo). the other Cherokee word in Poliespo comes
from the word āįįÆā (dohi), which means āpeace, harmony, and wellbeingā. itās
a nice word, and for some reason itās loaned into Poliespo as ātohoā. and thatās it. itās just those two. I
guess itās a good pair of words, but it really couldāve helped Poliepo build its
āCherokee Esperantoā identity if it had some more words like them. another fully new word is the pronoun āpiā,
a gender and animacy neutral third person pronoun, because Esperanto doesnāt have
one of those. one fun consequence of using āpiā for this is that āpiā is already
an Esperanto root; āpiaā means āpiousā. that means that the adjectival form of āpiā
canāt be āpiaā, so instead itās āpiesā. what else? I guess thereās some standardization
for country names, which makes sense. in Esperanto thereās a few different ways that toponyms
and demonyms can be related to each other, but in Poliespo the basic root always refers
to a person from the place, and you add a suffix to derive the country itself from that
root. thereās really not that much more novel
vocabulary. almost all the major changes Poliespo makes to Esperanto are in the grammar, not
the vocabulary. Poliespo is polysynthetic, which is meant
to make it so that you can speak Poliespo more quickly than Esperanto. a basic example
would be something like ābanantĢā±„n2plaÄqlxā a one word sentence that means āI donāt
like bananasā. polysynthesis is the main thing Poliespo borrows
from Cherokee, combining roots together so that single words can contain the information
of whole sentences. another grammatical feature inspired by Cherokee
is the question marking suffix ā-Äā, a combination of the Esperanto particle āÄuā
and the Cherokee suffix ā-tsuā. Poliespo has a lot of suffixes for things
like that. the definite article ālaā, for example, becomes the suffix ā-ā±„lā. the way this suffix works, and others like
it, is completely different from how Esperanto usually works, which makes it even weirder
when something is exactly the same as in Esperanto. sure, nasal vowels marking the accusative
isnāt the best idea, but if youāre gonna do it, do it consistently at least. you gotta
commit to your bad decisions. oh, I should also probably mention how Poliespo
deals with Esperantoās very bad system for marking gender. quick reminder, in Zamenhofās original version
of Esperanto, every animate noun in its basic form is implied to be masculine, and then
thereās a suffix you can use to change it to feminine. everyone agrees that this is uncontroversially
bad, so most Esperantists donāt use it that way. in addition to his new neutral third
person pronoun, Billy incorporates the almost-standard masculine suffix -iÄ-. bare minimum: achieved.
congratulations! but, rather than stop there, Billy goes one
extra step and adds in a special way of really not specifying gender, by replacing all the
vowels in the word with other alternative vowels! the existence of these forms kinda messes
everything up. if thereās a way of specifying feminine with -in- and a way of specifying
masculine with -iÄ-, why would you need a specific way of specifying that youāre not
specifying? looking at which examples are given for when
the masculine suffix is useful and for when the alternative vowels are useful reveals
the unfortunate answer. all the examples given for the masculine suffix are animals: you
can say katiÄo for a male cat; and the examples given for the alternative vowels are all humans:
you can say kqzo for a cousin of unspecified gender. the implication is that this system is definitely
not as neseksisma as it claims to be. men are still the default, just only when youāre
talking about humans. anyway, Poliespo has two registers. the polysynthetic
register is called Idpo, and the other register is called Zaespo, which functions more like
normal Esperanto, by which I mean it has completely unmodified Esperanto grammar. itās recommended
that if someone doesnāt understand what you mean in Idpo, you should repeat yourself
in Zaespo. in other words, if someone doesnāt understand
you in Poliespo, you can speak Esperanto, and that counts as still speaking Poliespo.
what I like about this feature is that itās like such a clear admission of defeat. if
you have to find a solution to a problem where someone who hypothetically already speaks
your language still has a hard time understanding it, something has gone horribly wrong. I kinda wish I was able to go more in depth
about how the polysynthetic stuff works but this document is completely impenetrable.
and donāt get me wrong, Iām like, pretty good at reading Esperanto, so itās not that,
itās just the way itās formatted makes some parts literally impossible for me to
read. like, thereās thereās almost three whole
pages of charts that look like this. what does any of this mean? Billy, you canāt
just say āhereās a table of profixesā and leave it at that! what are these profixes?
what are they used for? why does google translate translate āprofiksojā as āprofitsā?
I have literally no idea. it takes up a lot of the document so clearly
theyāre important, but if it says anywhere what they are, itās buried somewhere in
the unbroken lines of heavily abbreviated Esperanto with no paragraph breaks. my best
guess is that these are used for indicating the subjects and/or objects of verbs, but
I have no idea what any specific one would be used for. the following text is uh. I dunno, itās
from somewhere in the Poliespo document. itās short but also I donāt care enough to try
to get a longer piece of text in this. Osijo, samideanoj. ZwfeliÄa kĆŖtagā±„l decidi
lingvā±„lqpa projekto finfine alven2. all in all, Poliespo is bad. as far as I know,
it just might be the worst auxlang that has ever been made. even in a vacuum, completely
separated from its creator, Poliespo is an absolutely horrible auxiliary language. up until now, I havenāt come across an auxlang
worse than Vƶtgil. itās been my reference point for just how bad an auxlang can be.
Poliespo is worse than Vƶtgil, but Vƶtgil is so much better than Poliespo that comparing
the two at all is an insult to Vƶtgil. the chasm between Vƶtgil and Poliespo is
vast, and here at the bottom of it, itās impossible for me to believe that itās truly
empty. there are dozens of amature creations worse than Vƶtgil, but most of those have
never been seen by anyone but their creators. projects abandoned out of frustration, or
scrapped after realizing their low quality. while some of these unknown auxlangsā creators
have made better conlangs since, most of them were discouraged and quit conlanging altogether.
and so maybe some of those ex-conlangers might find at least some comfort in knowing that
what they made was still better than Poliespo. thanks for watching, and Iāll see you next
time, where Iāll be reviewing KÄlen. o tawa waso!
o pali e ale! sina ken, tawa mi!
mi ken kute e kalama sina
tan insa pilin mi! hey everyone, jan Misali here. did you know
that my second album Latin Extended-D is available to download on Bandcamp for only one dollar?
and that it contains songs like could you edit it?, dreams of our āconglangā community,
let the bodies built to scale, seximal fractions, and š³what if we kissedš³in 2019š³,
my tribute to 2010s internet culture that took five years to make? and that buying it
is a great way for people who canāt commit to a monthly subscription on Patreon to support
my content? oh, and thanks to Jules for being in the end
theme for the rest of the season. you should definitely go check out their Soundcloud.
okay, see you next month!
Aka Worst version of Esperanto
This conlang is so bad it gave me the creeps