Conlang Showcase - Sparai

so english is a mess right i think we can all agree on that but if you think english is a mess just wait till you see my very first conlang this will be painful but first i probably ought to tell you what this video is there are going to be two parts a history part and the actual conlanging part the conlanging part starts around the time i start addressing and fixing the orthography due to the nature of my editing i have no clue when that will be so i'll put a note on screen if i remember telling you where the serious conling actually begins anyway there's some good news and some bad news regarding the documentation of this language the bad news is that most of it has since been lost the good news is that most of it has since been lost i managed to find a total of three sheets of paper to go off of plus my memory which is usually pretty good anyway my idea of a conlang in 2012 was a spelling reform of english you'd think i might come up with something somewhat logical say something that looks like this but no i went off my knowledge of kindergarten phonics and divided vowels into short and long no not these but these this was my understanding of how vowels worked so i made single vowels represent the sounds in the short column and double vowels represent the sounds in the long column not off to a great start are we it gets worse i made a number of orthographical changes to english that were not only unnecessary but just downright stupid i'll try to order them from least to most stupid so first off we have no silent vowels and no double consonants this one actually makes sense because if you're doing an english spelling reform why keep the silent vowels next i had the letter j represent what i wrote as the y sound but i didn't know ipa and was probably not aware that it was a separate phoneme so i'm sure i meant yeah now what to do with this sound well we'll get there next i disobeyed my double vowel rules and made the letter combination e i represent the sound and dinosaur this one that's not too horrible i guess the next one i did was a little worse i made ou stand for the owl sound probably getting it from about or something like that next i split the letter c into two sounds and which is also pretty logical what's not logical is that to represent those sounds i use the german sharpest s to represent and a ch to represent like what was i thinking not only did i specify that surface s could only be used at the beginning of words but it could represent the sh sound if followed by an h fortunately this was interchangeable with sh wait never mind i changed that too because albanian had a little influence on my first conlang if you can call it that so xh and set h could be used interchangeably for the same sound we're not even close to done the next crimes against humanity were as follows i totally cut w out of the equation and replace the sound with v then i took a page out of the west slavic book and made cz stand for the ch sound since for some reason i didn't want to use k for its intended purpose and made ch stand in its place i instructed the reader to always roll your r's whatever that means and then saw the word air saw the ai making that weird sound at the beginning and declared that a i would stand for whatever that sound is i think this is the closest to my pronunciation regardless the word error would now be spelled error anyway that might just be the worst change i made if it wasn't for that pesky j sound do you know what logical choice i made for this here it is i have no words for this to top it all off i created a new letter why because i wanted to i guess so aside from all that we have all proper nouns just being spelled like they are in english because why not and an apostrophe to separate the word and any suffix i tacked on to the end so this is the state of our language now that was old ingross yeah you can see that diacritics are about to be discovered after performing these orthographical changes because it seems that's all i cared about i actually started branching out from english vocabulary just a tad bit ingrows took a hard left towards german and then the language became a bad german ripoff too i made another series of bad orthographical changes before deciding to scrap the language not because i thought it was bad but because i was just getting bored with it i guess somewhere in there i replaced qt with something maybe even worse the hebrew letter hit why don't ask me i don't think even 2014 me would know so by the time this mess of a conlang was abandoned there is a random hebrew letter floating around amongst the diacritics i can't even type that without my nice left-aligned format flipping out the language certainly lived up to its name it was gross a couple years went by and i must have found the old white binder with this gross language in it silly 2017 me looked at it and thought wow this sucks and set out to fix it and it was still bad i called it epilish which is now the name of a culture on keisha's because i like how the name sounds anyway it was an improvement over the original but anything could be considered an improvement over the original i standardized the orthography which was still a mess but not to the same degree by this point i definitely knew the ipa or was at least getting familiar with it which makes making this video much easier i have one sentence from this area kilis epilich i speak epolish so we're getting somewhere right the only proper way to deal with a conlang this bad is to redo in a way that's intentionally bad or at least that was my mindset at the start of this before i started liking where the language was going 2012 philo didn't know what he was doing maybe 2020 philo doesn't either but i like to think i've at least somewhat improved in the last eight years enough to be able to say that what i'm about to do is a hundred percent intentional there were many times when i thought that i should just scrap the whole idea because it's too much of a mess biblion took this philosophy with his first conlang thandian and based on what he put in his video about it he was right but there's one big difference between me and bibleridian besides the fact that he's british and actually a good conlanger he knew way more than i did when he made the thandian 2012 me didn't know what verb conjugations or noun cases or adjective agreement were i couldn't make ingrows a hulking mess because i didn't have the knowledge to do so so i can redo it because there's not really a whole lot to redo my idea of a conlang back then was 90 orthography so let's do this thing i think it's only right to address the orthography first here's a vowel chart with all the vowels in this reboot version of the language carried over directly from the epolish phase we'll go ahead and get rid of this sound and move this sound up to the schwa my ai from air used to stand for this sound here because i thought the nice german word vasa was pronounced vassar not quite but wouldn't it be fun to leave ai in as the weirdest schwa ever we'll just have it at the ends of words everywhere else it'll be umlau e and you can justify it by saying that at some point the i sound at the end of words just became a schwa that's plausible i distinctly remember using the letter j at the ends of words for the e sound i think i see what i was going for but it didn't quite work so we'll just forget that ever happened so the e sound at the end of a word can be either a single or double i which doesn't stand for it anymore because we won't be using that it can be doubled because in the epiless phase i seem to have randomly doubled a few of them so why not carry that over the needlessly complicated orthography is getting more complete by the second aside from the occasional double eye we'll just get rid of all the double vowels we'll also get rid of circumflex u and replace it with umlau o for the u sound and this sound can go away too so the single a can represent this sound uml a can be kept as the a sound since that's almost what it's like in german and this mess took inspiration from german plus unless it's over an i i'm always partial to an umlaut all we have to do now is stop using u for the schwa and move it on over to u to take the place of its fallen double brother with that the vowels have been simplified and we're ready to move on let's tackle the consonants now fortunately they aren't as much of a cluster as the vowels but there are still some anomalies as far as cz goes we can scrap that if we want chu in this language we'll just use good old c if i didn't want to use it at all in ingross i'm definitely using it here except sometimes it won't be c instead it will be supplanted by h j in some places why i'll do you one better why not perhaps there was a vowel between them and some fictional predecessor of the language as for shu i'm inclined to stay with the vein of xh from the original angros so i'll cut it down to just x let's simplify that weird hv ligature to just a normal hv at the beginning of words and just v everywhere else why historical spelling reasons if french can do it i can do it it seems i reluctantly used a k in the late ingrows phase joined with an h for whatever reason let's rectify this it's just k from now on ou will be changed to a u for the sound l because that's just more logical the rhodic system is a mess of course so we'll merge them all into a nice familiar alveolar tap represented by a single r we'll drop s set in favor of s we'll drop the schwa as a letter since it's represented by the good logical choice a i as well as um e and uma u can go away too since u is represented by the plane u there's one more thing i'm forgetting uh write the hebrew letter what to do what to do ah yes i know to top off this strange amalgamation of a language we're going to honor that horrible aesthetic choice by replacing the hebrew letter and the qt combination with the russian letter pe yes it's stupid it's also more aesthetic and fits better with the latin script it's easier to type with formatting and everything and the letter p is closer to the letter q than h is that last one was a joke but this whole video was a joke so does it really matter i'm kidding about using a russian letter i hope you haven't clicked off yet because i'm just going to use a plain old j for the g sound it makes sense since we put an h in front of the j for right and one last thing end with a tilde for the sound cedilla c for the sh sound h u for the sound and zj for the j sound because i really like all of those sounds finally we need a name for this new phase of the language i'll call it sparra after the word for stupid to reflect the roots of this language as far as grammar goes let's start with the basics sparrow has an sov word order no articles no cases two numbers singular and plural no genders and agreement between nouns and verbs for number and person nouns are pretty straightforward so let's go over verbs first every verb ends with a vowel followed by a k r or n and that part is dropped when not in the infinitive form so a regular k verb like stitchock would look like this a regular r verb would look like this and a regular n verb would look like this of course this is all for regular verbs there are some irregular verbs seven to be exact those are the following to be which is oz to have which is meis to speak which is lease to come which is umri to go which is quiche to want which is ailee and to make which is kris if you're interested go ahead and pause the video to screenshot these agreement tables i'm not going to run through them but here they are verbs can be put in simple past tense if they are first put in the equivalent of third person singular conjugation and then the suffix mat is appended to the end for future tense you can use the suffix talk dropping the k off the infinitive and keeping the vowel we'll also give them a reflexive prefix if the need arises you might be thinking philo why put the verb in third person singular just to make it past tense well we're not really putting it in third person singular it's just the same ending long ago it could have been something more like panzak mat but that's hard to say so over time the k fell off and we got panzamat as for why we aren't using umlaui here i don't know maybe the old scribes made the connection with the conjugation pattern moving on now pronouns are fairly straightforward since there is no grammatical case pronouns only have one form for person and number adjectives and adverbs are both glued to their nouns to eliminate the need for agreement in addition to these for questions there will be a particle at the beginning of a sentence introducing the question and then the rest of the sentence is in normal sov word order there is also a negative prefix ga which can be put on nouns verbs whatever you like to make the opposite of them so now i'm going to read you some sentences in this new conlang which i'm really starting to like ki malibukayat lenja i read books a lot here we see key for i like i said fairly straightforward this object needs some unpacking mali means much or very in this case modifying the word vukayat which means books i'd like to note that if it weren't for the mali in front of it vukayat would start with an h finally the verb lenja is the first person singular conjugation of zenjak which means to read and there we have it let's try another one you speak two languages here the pronoun mock is present meaning you like last time we have a noun with an adjective on the front of it duda meaning to tanuj is spada for language and of course it gets a plural suffix now we deal with the verb again and this one's a regular lis means to speak but since it's irregular we give it the second person singular conjugation lezak and we're done let's try one last sentence when the light turns on it will become very bright let's break this down by clause first we have juan which comes directly from the english word when lesht is similar in this regard except it comes from the german word lisht anjada is interesting on just means on and jada is the third person singular conjugation of jarik the very versatile verb meaning to move so literally the light moves on or unmoves i suppose because when constructions like this occur the add position is stuck at the front of the verb if you want to say i took the note down you'd have to say i down took the note albeit in sparrow word order and grammar anyway the second clause sierra means both he and it since there's no non-gendered third-person pronoun it defaults to seer miley is really two words mali which we saw means very a couple sentences ago and chela which simply means bright finally the verb a future tense become the original word is mophan that's right to become is an adverb but we don't get to see its conjugations in action because it's a future tense verb here so sad what is my reasoning for making this video you may ask if i want to lie to myself i could say that it's to show that everyone makes mistakes and even the pros have to start from somewhere though i do not in any way count myself among the pros if i don't want to lie to myself i'll say that this video at least the first part of it was a self-deprecating joke both are true in their own ways but anyway i hope you enjoyed this video and learned from my mistakes because there were many of them if anyone is interested i might start making a learn sparrow video series to share this conlang with you all and it'd be cool if john measley did a conlang critic video on sparra i know that goal is a bit out there but hey i'm a dreamer let me know what you think of that down in the comments anyway see you in the next one mali thank god in the spade scene

Channel: Caeruleus

Views: 4,973

Rating: 4.9663863 out of 5

Keywords: Sparai

Id: K3Ytsj7OLPw

Length: 15min 32sec (932 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 06 2020