welcome to Conlang Critic, the show that gets
facts wrong about YOUR favorite conlang! Iâm jan Misali, and in this episode, weâll
be looking at the same language world language, Sambahsa. so, here we are. another episode, another international auxiliary
language. Sambahsa, also known as âSambahsa-Mundialectâ,
was created by Dr. Oliver Simon, first published in 2007. itâs a global international auxiliary
language, putting it nominally in the same category as your Esperantos and Novials and
what have you, but Oliverâs approach to auxlanging is significantly different from
those other auxlangsâ creators. Dave MacLeod describes Sambahsa as, quote,
âa type of regularized Indo-European with borrowings from other language familiesâ. unlike most other auxlangs, Sambahsa makes
no attempt to be simple to learn. while it is more regular than any major natural
language, Oliver goes out of his way to make Sambahsa feel natural, prioritizing this above
ease of use. my primary sources of information for this
review were the seventh edition of The Grammar of Sambahsa-Mundialect in English by Dr. Oliver
Simon, as well as Henrique Matheus da Silva Limaâs Sambahsa Mundialect Complete Grammar,
both of which are available freely to download. Sambahsaâs consonants are: this is a lot of consonants. we donât have to look far to find out Whatâs
the Most Commonly Spoken Language Whose Consonant Inventory Is Incompatible with That of This
Particular International Auxiliary Language?, because itâs English! well, kinda. those two rhotics, /Ę/ and /r/, cannot both
be approximated by English /Éš/ while remaining distinct, but Sambahsaâs rhotics are described
not as two separate phonemes but as different realizations of one single phoneme. two realizations which are written differently,
and you canât predict which one to use through phonological context alone. still, the phrasing used when describing them
suggests that merging these two phonemes is probably fine. the alveolar affricates /ts/ and /dz/ have
no equivalent English phonemes, but English speakers can pronounce them as functionally
identical consonant clusters, one of which appears at the end of the word âaffricatesâ. the palatal and velar fricatives /ç/ and
/x/ are absent from a typical English consonant chart, but [ç] commonly appears as the <h>
in âhueâ, and [x] is, of course, the <ch> in âlochâ. so you can theoretically make the argument
that this inventory is compatible with English. Iâd disagree with that, but it is an argument
that you can make. regardless, any way you slice it, this inventory
definitely is incompatible with Mandarin Chinese. now, it might make sense to say that this
is too many consonants to expect everyone to be able to handle. but to be fair, Sambahsa isnât trying to
be maximally easy to learn. this language assumes that if you want to
speak it, youâre willing to put in the effort to learn how to say its words. speaking of effort, Sambahsaâs vowels are: thatâs nine vowels, six of which having
long and short varieties. I think this is more vowels than necessary,
though once again thatâs pretty clearly by design. âmore than necessaryâ is a common theme
for Sambahsa. in addition to these monophongs, Sambahsa
also has some diphthongs, but theyâre probably not actually phonemic. hereâs all the ones I could find in the
vocabulary. like a lot of auxlangs, Sambahsaâs phonotactics
are left undefined, which is something Iâm pretty tired of seeing. thatâs how you get words like âsciiâ
/ËstÍĄsi.i/ in Esperanto, words that plenty of people will have a hard time articulating. and yet, after looking at Sambahsa, I canât
help but think I might have been too harsh on auxlangs that do this. after all, at least none of them have anything
remotely as bad as ârjienrlweyâ! hey, Oliver! hey. Dr. Oliver! listen. w- what is this? itâs like. okay, so Iâm looking at this word here,
right, and I just canât help but wonder. like, ignoring the etymology entirely, just
looking at it purely as a sequence of phonological segments intended to be pronounced as a single
unit. what the heck is this, Dr. Oliver? hey everyone. itâs me, jan Misali, the person who wrote
this video and also is currently speaking. I know what some of you are probably thinking,
because I read the comments. youâre thinking, âso what if you think
some of these words are hard to pronounce? that doesnât mean that nobody can pronounce
them!â and youâre right, Iâm sure there do exist people who are able to say rjienrlwey
without any problems. and thatâs why Iâm inviting you, the viewer,
to take the #RjienrlweyChallenge! all you need to do is record audio of yourself saying
the word ârjienrlweyâ out loud. and just remember, this is a global international auxiliary
language, so its target audience is âeveryoneâ! seriously I promise this video isnât going
to be 100% about aesthetics but there is in fact a lot to say about Sambahsaâs orthography. so, pros: Sambahsa uses the plain Latin alphabet
with no diacritics. it also makes an effort to somewhat preserve
the spellings of its words from their sources, to make them more recognizable. cons: Sambahsa makes an effort to somewhat
preserve the spellings of its words from their sources. this means silent letters, double letters,
a complete lack of any way to reliably derive spelling from pronunciation, and just. just
so many context sensitive pronunciation rules, like thereâs just so many of them. Iâm putting them all on screen. aw man thatâs way too small, youâre not
gonna be able to read that, here Iâm zooming in and scrolling by th- look, the point is
thereâs a lot of these rules. and like, I get it? I guess? like, in a natural language all this stuff
would be completely justified. and itâs not like, ambiguous or anything. like, no, you canât derive spelling from
pronunciation, but you can unambiguously derive pronunciation from spelling. so it has that going for it. thereâs this one very specific thing Iâd
like to point out here, but thereâs a bit of setup necessary first. so, Sambahsa has a lot of consonants, right?
and thereâs this specific design problem that comes out of trying to decide how to
represent all of them. so, letâs say youâre Oliver and you speak
French, and youâre pretty comfortable using the digraph <ch> for /Ę/, but of course itâs also pretty commonly
used for /tĘ/, so it makes sense for that too. further back, /ç/ and /x/ both appear in
German, and theyâre both spelled with <ch>. but, uh oh! you canât use <ch> for all of
those things! so what do you do? well, in some languages, /x/ is written with
<h>, but thatâs not an option because you also have /h/, and it wouldnât make sense
for that to be anything other than <h>. maybe you could get away with using <j> for
/x/, like in Spanish, but you also happen to have /Ę/, and as a French speaker, you
find that using <j> for /Ę/ makes more sense. and of course <x> is off the table, because
in the interest of preserving spellings you gotta use it for /ks/. well, beans. you guess you gotta write /x/ using <kh> then,
which isnât super common but at least itâs somewhat intuitive. well, thatâs one <ch> down, you suppose. and up to this point, I completely understand
your line of reasoning. what I would do from here is use <sh> for
/Ę/, and then use <tsh> or something for /tĘ/. obviously itâs not ideal, but with this
many consonants to work with you gotta make compromises. what you do instead, and by you I still mean
Dr. Oliver Simon, is that you decide to write /Ę/ with <sch>, like in German, which is like. sure, itâs fine. it works. and then you use <ch> for /tĘ/. on its own, also fine. this is in fact the most sensible way to write
this phoneme. this is where the weird thing happens. you go right ahead and use <sh> for /ç/. there are a lot of things I could have singled
out about Sambahsaâs orthography, but this, the decision to use <sh> for the sound /ç/,
is the one aspect where I do not in any way understand why it is what it is. like, it doesnât make sense to have /ç/
as a phoneme in this language to begin with, but the way Sambahsa uses /ç/ is baffling
to me. because, remember, itâs specifically aiming
to preserve spellings, so you get stuff like this, which is pretty clearly from the English word
âshortstopâ, and it in fact means âshortstopâ, but then, because preserving spelling was
the priority, itâs actually âhyortstopâ! the icing on the cake for this, the thing
thatâs too good to be true, is the word âshibbolethâ, which, if youâre unfamiliar, means âthing
that you say to prove that you are capable of pronouncing the sound [Ę]â. so remember when I quoted that guy at the
beginning of this video saying that Sambahsa is a type of regularized Indo-European? well, I guess now I have to explain what that
means. Sambahsa is primarily based on Proto-Indo-European,
the reconstructed ancestor of the Indo-European languages. the Indo-European language family is the most
significant language family in the world, by any metric that measures significance with
the things that Indo-European languages have the most of. like âspeakersâ! basing an auxlang on Proto-Indo-European kinda
makes sense similarly to how it kinda makes sense to base an auxlang on Latin. Latin is the ancestor of the Romance languages,
which themselves are very commonly spoken, and Latin-derived vocabulary can be found
in plenty of languages outside of the Romance family. Proto-Indo-European, of course, is also the
ancestor of the Romance languages, as well as the Germanic languages and the Indo-Aryan
languages and the Slavic languages and the Iranian languages et cetera et cetera. so, in theory, thereâs nothing wrong with
an auxlang based on Proto-Indo-European. however, I think youâve gotten a pretty
good feel for Sambahsaâs design philosophy by now, right? well, buckle up! hereâs a declension table. these suffixes are added to nouns and adjectives
depending on case, number, and gender, but only if you want to, and only if it sounds
good. the information contained in these âeuphonic
vocalizationâ suffixes is completely redundant, and is already indicated with other things. these are only here if you just really want
to add a suffix to a noun or an adjective declined for case, number, and gender. oh, and yes, this auxlang does indeed have
grammatical gender. fortunately, its noun classes arenât quite
as arbitrary as those found in most Indo-European languages with grammatical gender, you just
use whatever grammatical gender corresponds to whatever youâre talking aboutâs gender
gender. other than these completely optional suffixes,
noun morphology is relatively simple. the only thing thatâs required to be marked
on nouns directly is number, where the root form of the noun is the singular and the plural
is formed with one of five suffixes or no suffix, depending on what the noun ends with
and if itâs animate. I assume that âphonetically incompatibleâ
is supposed to mean that you use those suffixes when the nounâs root form ends with a sibilant,
but thatâs not actually explicitly spelled out, another reason why itâs bad to leave
phonotactics undefined. while case and gender are not required to
be marked on nouns, they are marked on pronouns. this isnât all of them, just the ones that
could fit on a chart like this. it really isnât as bad as it looks. if you look closely enough you can see the
repeating patterns here. the third person pronouns also function as
definite articles. they usually show up as definite articles
more often than as pronouns because of the extensive verb system, which- oh, I almost completely skipped the indefinite
article! unlike the definite articles which come in a wide variety of flavors, the indefinite
article is pretty much always âunâ, but you can also add those optional euphonic vocalization
suffixes to your heartâs content, just in case you missed them. anyway, verbs- uh, you know what, letâs talk about adjectives
first! adjectives are nice. I like adjectives. they go before nouns or prepositional phrases. once again, those handy dandy euphonic vocalization
suffixes are at your disposal, but the only morphology you have to worry about is the
comparative and superlative suffixes. this is functionally pretty familiar for English
speakers, but honestly at this point Englishiness feels like a breath of fresh air. you can also turn any adjective into an adverb
super simply by adding the -ye suffix, written with a hyphen. once again, super basic stuff. in contrast with this very simple system,
verbs- I, in contrast with this very simple system,
prepositions are a bit more complicated. in terms of morphology, most are nice and
straightforward, like âproâ, meaning âforâ, but then the word for âofâ has different
forms depending on number and gender, like in French. as far as I can tell, no other prepositions
work like this. also, nouns within prepositional phrases are
put in the accusative case. I guess this isnât that complicated. especially not when compared to- when compared to- okay, fine, Iâve put it off long enough. itâs time to talk about verbs. what youâre looking at here is a table of
the various suffixes used for verb conjugation in Sambahsa. I know this looks like itâs a lot of stuff
to keep track of, but donât worry, itâs actually much, much more complicated than
it looks. but first, we need to talk about the Indo-European
ablaut. in Indo-European languages, ablaut is a type
of vowel gradation that happens sometimes, like in English âsing, sang sungâ. this
has its origins in the Proto-Indo-European language, where... in Sambahsa, a somewhat more regular version
of ablaut is used as part of the verb conjugation system. it works slightly differently for different
types of verbs, but all verbs can be grouped into one of eight categories, which can be
identified entirely based on spelling. of course, since spelling cannot be derived from
pronunciation... the first category of verbs is the verbs with
a ânasal infixâ, meaning that they have some nasal consonant next to an unstressed
<e> in their stem. in the present tense, the <e> is removed, and in the past tense, the
whole nasal infix is removed. unfortunately, itâs not quite that simple,
because... quote, âYou may question: but why Sambahsa
has this characteristic? Sambahsa behaves
like a natural language, if you analyze it well, it's more pleasant to speak in this
way, people naturally would want to drop this unstressed
âeâ. Without this rule, the language
could be a bit easier, but it wouldn't be much comfortable to speak. Do you doubt me? Check whether the incorrect conjugation...
is pleasant to pronounce... It becomes a mess, if you look it well you'll
notice that that pronunciation is not very natural or human!â when the nasal infix is removed, any adjacent
<s> or <ss> is removed with it. additionally, the âVon Wahl rulesâ, which
weâll get into later, apply for verbs with... âPresent tense: pregno, pregens, pregent,
pregnems, pregent, pregnentâ the second category of verbs is called âunstressed
âeââ, which I have to assume includes verbs that end with silent e as well, based
on the examples provided. the standard suffixes generally apply here,
but in order to make sure that the stress patterns are... âThere is a sub-category of verbs endings
with ÂŤ ie Âť. Those verbs often correspond to
English nouns ending in â-icationâ.â now, the third category of verbs, verbs ending
with <eh> before at least one consonant, is where the real ablaut stuff starts happening. so, in the past tense, this <eh> is replaced
with <oh>, meaning that the past tense doesnât need to be marked at all for these verbs. so, âsprehgoâ is âI speakâ, but âio
sprohgâ is âI spokeâ. and as you can see, this is pretty similar to how âstrong
verbsâ in Germanic languages... âHowever, because of the difficult pronunciation
of the final ÂŤ -kw Âť, forms with conjugational endings are preferred :â the fourth category of verbs have <ei> or
<eu> as their inner vowels, and in the past tense these have their <e> removed, replacing
<ei> and <eu> with <i> and <u>. this is whatâs called the âzero-gradeâ in Proto-Indo-European,
and... â- sneigv : to snow
Present : sneigvt : Since âvâ is not directly after âeiâ, it does not turn to âfââ the fifth category is verbs with <a> as their
inner vowel, which turns into <ie> in the past tense. just a completely normal thing, replacing
/a/ with /je/. but then remember, itâs Sambahsa, so of course thereâs a bunch of stuff that
makes this more complicated... replacing the <a> with <ie> if the original
<a> was part of the digraph <au> means that now the <e> is part of the digraph <eu>, which
is pronounced like /øË/, so that means the /a/ to /je/ thing is sometimes actually /ao/
to /jøË/. and thatâs the system working as intended. completely regular! ugh, and donât even
get me started on... okay, weâre almost done, the sixth category
of verbs is verbs ending in a few specific consonants, and this is the main case where
the âVon Wahl rulesâ apply. so super broadly, these rules turn certain
consonants into specific other consonants in specific contexts. oops that was way too broad let me try again... â6th category of verbs : Von Wahl rules
The final consonants of these verbs undergo modifications for the past tense and the past
participle in âtâ. These are as follows:â the seventh category of verbs is verbs ending
with stressed vowels, and these are mostly regular, just sometimes adding an epenthetic
consonant for the suffixes that start with vowels... âMoreover, verbs ending with âvâ undergo
the following modifications for their past participle in âtâ. If âvâ comes after âaâ or a consonant,
âvâ turns to âwâ. Examples: solv = solwt; lav = lawt
Otherwise, âvâ disappears. Example: mov = mot
Those rules may look difficult at first sight, but they only encompass within a regular
framework irregularities often seen in English. Decide : decision; permit : permission; convert
: conversion; solve : solution; move : motionâ and then finally the eighth category is everything
else, and these just have the normal suffixes. really, this shouldâve been category one. and really itâs exactly as simple as it
sounds. despite most of what Iâve said in the past
several minutes, Sambahsa isnât like, completely horrible. Iâm sure a younger version of myself would
just say âitâs badâ and leave it at that, but Sambahsa really has some good ideas,
which are mostly found in its vocabulary. one of the biggest problems with international
languages is Eurocentrism, where a proposed global language is just optimized for Europe,
under the assumption that if something woks for Europe itâll be fine everywhere else. Sambahsa avoids this by deriving its vocabulary
from the most diverse set of source languages Iâve seen in a language covered on this
show, shown here on this pie chart, pun intended. the distribution is pretty iffy, and some
major language families are lumped into that âotherâ category, but itâs hard to argue
with Sambahsaâs results. from what I can tell, individual words in
Sambahsa were selected by asking âwhatâs the most common origin for a word with this
meaning?â, adjusted for how many people speak each language, as a way of getting at
what the most recognizable word for any individual concept is. and, honestly, I think this is a pretty good
way of generating vocabulary. checking various words in different languages
against Sambahsaâs vocabulary, Sambahsa generally succeeds in finding some sort of
common ground. in this semi-random set of words, you can
see that every word I picked is similar enough to be recognizable to speakers of at least
one of the top ten most common languages, with more common languages in general matching
more words, with at least one pretty major exception. Mandarin Chinese has by far the most native
speakers of any language. itâs extremely important. despite this, words from the Chinese languages
make up a disproportionately small portion of Sambahsa vocabulary. this is, I think, somewhat understandable. while the Chinese languages have a very large
number of speakers, Sinitic words are measurably less internationally recognizable than words
from other massive language families. individual examples of Sinitic words that
are well known outside of East Asia are usually words for concepts that originated in China,
like the âteaâ example shown on this chart. the problem isnât really the amount of Sinitic
vocabulary. the problem is the quality of the Sinitic
vocabulary. welcome back, rjienrlwey! this word has cognates in various Chinese
languages, as well as Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. there is a significant amount of variation,
but you can still kinda tell that they are related. so Sambahsa makes a compromise. it doesnât go to the Old Chinese common
ancestor of these words, like how vocabulary from other sources works, it just jams everything
together and calls it a day. the only other real problem I have with the
Sambahsa lexicon is how deriving new words from existing roots just kinda isnât a thing. like, even something as simple as turning
a noun into an adjective works differently depending on the etymology of the given word,
which means you either have to know every wordâs etymology or more likely that you
just have to learn every noun-derived adjective separately. despite a few oddities, I in general think
Sambahsaâs vocabulary is pretty good, easily its strongest aspect. oh, and for what itâs worth, Sambahsa passes
the âwhat do you call Germanyâ test, but it fails the follow-up âwhat do you call
Japanâ test. the following text was written by Dr. Oliver
Simon, as part of a description of the Sambahsa translation of Aliceâs Adventures in Wonderland
by Lewis Carroll. Ciois, ego regreto od ia major (taiper maschourst)
planbahsas sont pior gwaur-ye centret ep romanc bahsas
(samt un wolga om germanic influences). Ya, Westeuropay bahsas sont extreme-ye importanta
tienxia, bet ne sont ia wahid surces pro international
launwerds (yani werds trohven in uno mier numer om bahsas,
esdi ta bayghe different linguistic familias). Itak ho chust un novatoro proschgumt. all in all, Sambahsa is fascinating. by most objective metrics I could use to judge
an IAL, Sambahsa is a failure. and yet, there are some things it does remarkably
well. if it were a fictional language, Sambahsa
would be one of my favorites. but, Sambahsa is not a fictional language. thereâs a quote near the beginning of Oliverâs
reference grammar attributed to Steve Rice, who says, âall languages (less frills) and
especially all auxlangs are about equal in difficulty; they just load the difficulty
differently. Sambahsa drops a piano on you when you ring
the doorbell, but after that it's probably a gracious host.â while maybe it is the case that a simpler
language comes with difficulties when trying to express yourself with it, I think Iâd
still rather not have a piano dropped on me. thanks for watching, and Iâll see you next
time, where Iâll be reviewing Sindarin. pakala la, sina awen lon
nasin sina, li weka e jaki o sona e ni:
ike li pini ala ike la, o kute e ni:
That verb system is the scariest thing I've seen thus far on Halloween. Very fitting.
This conlang seems all over the place..
This submission has been randomly featured in /r/serendipity, a bot-driven subreddit discovery engine. More here: /r/Serendipity/comments/dprhqw/conlang_critic_sambahsa_xpost_from_rconlangs/
Huh I know of the conlanger behind it through Facebook. Heâs prominent in the Indo-European Conlanging group. Often engages in PIE discussions.
Somehow it sounds like a cross between German, French, and Chinese.
"sing sang sung" -doesn't that sound oddly familiar? (hint: baseball caps)
They weren't even trying.
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