welcome to Conlang Critic, the show that gets facts wrong about YOUR favorite conlang! I’m
jan Misali, and in this episode, we’ll be looking at polysynthetic Esperanto, Poliespo.
like a lot of conlangs I’ve reviewed, I first heard about Poliespo when people started
requesting it. it’s 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. it’s a polysynthetic combination of Esperanto and
Cherokee, and Billy claims that learning it is “your golden opportunity to acquire a
Native American spirit”, a phrase with some troublingly racist implications.
oh, and get this, if you can get someone else to join the Poliespo organization, which exists,
you’ll 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 language’s 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, Poliespo’s creator, is currently on death row for several violent
crimes, including three murders. this is, obviously, horrifying, and I’m 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,
Poliespo’s consonants are:
m n
m̆ /ʰ̃m/ n̆ /ʰ̃n/
p /pʷ/
t c /ts/
ĉ /tʃ/ k
/ʔ/ b
d ĝ /dʒ/
g /ɡ/ b̆ /ʰ̃b/
k̆ /ʰ̃k/ f
t̂ /θ/ s
ŝ /ʃ/ y /ç/
ĥ /x/ h
v /ð/
z ĵ /ʒ/
ŭ /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 don’t even know where to begin. there are just so many bad
decisions on display here it’s almost incredible.
I guess I could start by just explaining what exactly it is that you’re looking at here.
since Poliespo is based on Esperanto, its inventory is an extension of Esperanto’s
inventory, with sounds added to it allegedly so it can accommodate the new Cherokee vocabulary.
now, for an IAL, I think Esperanto’s inventory is already a bad start. the three way /k x
h/ distinction is especially bad for an international language.
the thing is, while I’m 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, here’s Wikipedia’s 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 doesn’t 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. I’m
pretty sure that it’s in some way from Cherokee /kʷ/, and those preaspirated phonemes are
from something that specifically happens in Oklahoman Cherokee, but everything else? no
idea.
speaking of no idea, there’s also two more letters that are supposed to be phonemic consonants,
specifically /kts/ and /ɡdz/.
Billy specifically says that these are pronounced as one consonant, but what exactly that’s
supposed to mean is unclear.
I don’t think we have to do whatever that gameshow thing was called this time, right?
I’ve seen a couple of people suggest that when an auxlang’s 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 it’s fair to say that this isn’t a very newcomer friendly inventory.
well, you know what they say about when you can’t say something nice.
Poliespo’s vowels are:
i ĭ /ɪ/
u e
x /ə/ q /ɜ/
o ⱥ /æ/
a w /ɔ/
that vowel written with q there is defined in the IPA with that reverse epsilon letter,
but it’s then called the vowel specifically the American English pronunciations of words
like “girl”, “shirt”, and “fir”. since he specified American English, it’s
probably actually supposed to be more like [ɚ] than [ɜ].
anyway, each of these ten oral vowels comes with a corresponding nasal vowel, and also
there’s phonemic tone? I guess? the way tone works is explained very poorly, and I
can’t confidently say anything about it other than that it exists. I think there’s
three phonemic tones, but I’m not sure.
it’s just... I seriously don’t have the words to describe this. this is supposed to
be an international auxiliary language, right? I am interpreting “world language” correctly
to mean “language for the entire world” and not “language that exists in the world”,
right? the conlangers who discussed this language casually in the middle of a conversation about
language acquisition in 1993 didn’t completely misrepresent what it’s 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 isn’t a particularly good large inventory. aesthetically, it’s all
over the place. I made fun of Sambahsa, but Sambahsa knew what it was trying to do. Poliespo’s
inventory looks like Billy just threw in everything he could pronounce and called it a day. it’s
straight up bad design. easily the worst I’ve 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, it’s definitely not ideal.
the preaspirated consonants are written with a breve diacritic, Esperanto’s wild use
of the circumflex is extended to include t-circumflex for /θ/ and z-circumflex for /kts/, which
as already mentioned has z-breve for /ɡdz/ to go with it.
and that’s far from the worst stuff here. before even getting to the vowels, let’s
talk about the labiolabial stop and the voiced dental fricative.
these two phonemes are written as two overlapping letters, /pʷ/ with p-w, and /ð/ 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. it’s so hard to tell what you’re
even looking at for either of them.
and the thing is, it’s not like typewriter-compatibility was Billy’s top priority or anything, because
you can tell in the document that he couldn’t type most of the diacritics and had to write
them over the letters by hand. so what’s even the point of these?
oh, and I almost went right past the glottal stop! glottal stops are indeed phonemic in
Poliespo, but they’re also completely unwritten. why? what’s the point?
and then there’s the vowels. i-breve and a-slash are... okay? I guess? I mean, I’m
okay with them in comparison to everything else, because this is where most of the “clever”
reuse of unused letters comes in.
I basically skipped right over y for /ç/, but there’s also x for /ə/, q for /ɜ/,
and w for /ɔ/. 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 that’s a
good solution, was historically a vowel letter, after all, and Cherokee has no use
for it as a consonant.
this, however, isn’t that. it’s a random remapping of unused letters just because they’re
available. it’s garbage. and this still isn’t the most baffling feature of Poliespo
orthography.
so, Poliespo’s vowels can be nasalized, which is indicated with a circumflex. there
is, however, an exception: nasal schwa isn’t written with x-circumflex. that’s the nasal
vowel in Cherokee written with , so it makes sense that it would be counted as its
own thing in Poliespo. in Poliespo, nasal schwa /ə̃/ 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 aren’t written. it does apparently matter for grammar things what tones vowels
have, but you have no way of knowing what tone you’re supposed to use for any vowel
if it isn’t rising tone.
this orthography... is bad. it’s transparently inaccessible, infuriatingly unintuitive, and
worst of all, very very ugly. looking at Poliespo text gives me a headache. it’s like it was
specifically designed with me specifically in mind, with the intention of using the Latin
alphabet in a way that’s 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.
“osijo” replaces “saluton” as the basic greeting, and this is directly from
the Cherokee word for hello, “ᎣᏏᏲ” (osiyo).
the other Cherokee word in Poliespo comes from the word “ᏙᎯ” (dohi), which means
“peace, harmony, and wellbeing”. it’s a nice word, and for some reason it’s loaned
into Poliespo as “toho”.
and that’s it. it’s just those two. I guess it’s a good pair of words, but it
really could’ve helped Poliepo build its “Cherokee Esperanto” identity if it had
some more words like them.
another fully new word is the pronoun “pi”, a gender and animacy neutral third person
pronoun, because Esperanto doesn’t have one of those. one fun consequence of using
“pi” for this is that “pi” is already an Esperanto root; “pia” means “pious”.
that means that the adjectival form of “pi” can’t be “pia”, so instead it’s “pies”.
what else? I guess there’s some standardization for country names, which makes sense. in Esperanto
there’s 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.
there’s 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 “banant̂ⱥn2plaĉqlx”
a one word sentence that means “I don’t like bananas”.
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 “-ĉ”,
a combination of the Esperanto particle “ĉu” and the Cherokee suffix “-tsu”.
Poliespo has a lot of suffixes for things like that. the definite article “la”,
for example, becomes the suffix “-ⱥl”.
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 isn’t the best idea, but if you’re 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 Esperanto’s very bad system for
marking gender.
quick reminder, in Zamenhof’s original version of Esperanto, every animate noun in its basic
form is implied to be masculine, and then there’s a suffix you can use to change it
to feminine.
everyone agrees that this is uncontroversially bad, so most Esperantists don’t use it that
way. in addition to his new neutral third person pronoun, Billy incorporates the almost-standard
masculine suffix -iĉ-. 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 there’s a way of specifying
feminine with -in- and a way of specifying masculine with -iĉ-, why would you need a
specific way of specifying that you’re 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 katiĉo 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 you’re 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. it’s recommended that if someone doesn’t understand what
you mean in Idpo, you should repeat yourself in Zaespo.
in other words, if someone doesn’t understand you in Poliespo, you can speak Esperanto,
and that counts as still speaking Poliespo. what I like about this feature is that it’s
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 don’t get me wrong, I’m like, pretty
good at reading Esperanto, so it’s not that, it’s just the way it’s formatted makes
some parts literally impossible for me to read.
like, there’s there’s almost three whole pages of charts that look like this. what
does any of this mean? Billy, you can’t just say “here’s a table of profixes”
and leave it at that! what are these profixes? what are they used for? why does google translate
translate “profiksoj” as “profits”? I have literally no idea.
it takes up a lot of the document so clearly they’re important, but if it says anywhere
what they are, it’s 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, it’s from somewhere in the Poliespo document. it’s
short but also I don’t care enough to try to get a longer piece of text in this.
Osijo, samideanoj. Zwfeliĉa kêtagⱥl decidi lingvⱥlqpa 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 haven’t come across an auxlang worse than Vötgil. it’s been my reference
point for just how bad an auxlang can be. Poliespo is worse than Vötgil, but Vötgil
is so much better than Poliespo that comparing the two at all is an insult to Vötgil.
the chasm between Vötgil and Poliespo is vast, and here at the bottom of it, it’s
impossible for me to believe that it’s truly empty. there are dozens of amature creations
worse than Vötgil, 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 auxlangs’ 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 I’ll see you next time, where I’ll be reviewing Kēlen.
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 “conglang” community, let the bodies built to scale, seximal fractions,
and 😳what if we kissed😳in 2019😳, my tribute to 2010s internet culture that
took five years to make? and that buying it is a great way for people who can’t 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!