thank you to... actually, nobody
wanted this. 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 the useless language worth less than ten dollars,
Kay(f)bop(t). actually, Kay(f)bop(t) isn't
the full name. it's an official name, but it's really
just a shorter version of
"Kay(f)dan(f)san(t)ap(t)vlir(t)sang(b)es(p)u(t)vom(b)ngag(t)vlim(p)kay(f)sna(f)kay(f)ga(f)
bop(t)veg(p)daf(f)shof(b)*om(p)vlim(p)ga(f)vlim(p)ga(f)",
which I am not saying again. the
name itself is highly descriptive. the first word
means "language", but with added suffixes that
cause it to specifically mean "limited, expected,
inedible, undying, epic language worth
less than ten dollars". the second word is an adjective
which can mean several things, but here
means "far less useful than average". it
could also mean "far more useful than average",
but it probably doesn't. I'm getting ahead of myself.
Kay(f)bop(t) is an artlang (?)
created by Daniel Swanson in 2015,
based on badconlangingideas.tumblr.com,
a blog full of jokes
about hypothetical conlangs with really
impractical features. Kay(f)bop(t)'s goal is to incorporate
a whole bunch of these impractical features into
one language. so, essentially, Kay(f)bop(t) is forty six
jokes thrown together into a single language, with
a few extra original jokes thrown in there. its
consonants are:
man, look at all those goofy
consonants! most of these are also in English,
with the exceptions of the percussive bimanual
stop, sinistral lateral click,
dextral lateral click, and the faciomanual
click, all of which are phonemes so rare that
I had to make up my own legitimate sounding names
for them for the purposes of this video. and, yes,
you do have my permission to use "faciomanual
click" in reference to the sound a facepalm makes.
personally, I would've included the linguolabial
trill, but that's just me. Kay(f)bop(t)'s vowels are:
this is just your classic five vowels here, each one able to
be pronounced approximately too many ways,
as well as a bonus sixth vowel, /ø/, written with
酶. Kay(f)bop(t) also
has four phonemic hats because
of course it does. if you were to actually attempt to
speak Kay(f)bop(t), you would need to quickly
swap between these four hats pretty much every
syllable. the orthography, compared
with everything else, is a little underwhelming.
it's pretty much exactly what you'd expect,
but with English type variation on the
vowels, and some nonstandard use of punctuation
for the weird sounds. the only surprises
here are the Han characters, which seem really out of
out of place, especially since they're only used in
one word each. 酶
is only used in the word "酶(p)", which means
"null", and the other three are only used in the word
"z瑟g(f)蕯蕦(f)z瑟g(t)蕯a(f)", which means "a type of lover who
works hard to fit in with your life, because they love you so
much and are willing to put in effort to make your relationship
work". you might notice that both of these words
are jokes. now, speaking as an ameteaur
memeticist, both of these jokes woud've
probably been funnier if Swanson had spelled them more
phonetically, especially since both of them are essentially
jokes about pronunciation, to
some extent. simple words in Kay(f)bop(t) are usually
extremely long, and that's mostly because of the
suffix system. it's kinda like Ithkuil except it's
mandatory, and it's simultaneously more
specific and less precise. nouns
are required to be conjugated by case,
number, expectation, edibility,
grammatical gender, manner of death,
awesomeness, and market value, and verbs
are required to be conjugated by number,
expectation, mental state,
day of the week, honesty and subject magnitude
relative to that of a breadbox, awesomeness,
and certainty. again, these aren't
optional. every noun ends with nine
suffixes, and every verb ends with seven suffixes.
you might think that this means Kay(f)bop(t) goes for
maximum precision, but then you might look at
the vocabulary. a Kay(f)bop(t) root can have up
to and including eighteen (18) distinct,
unrelated meanings. for example, the root
"bes(b)baf(t)let(p)gob(b)-" can mean hatter,
terminology, journalese,
grasslike, unrevenged,
alphabetization, misty,
heal, althea, detain,
edict, rehash,
guzzler, thalassemia,
ergot, humilia, raceabout,
or epanchement. this combined
with the suffix system means interpreting a
Kay(f)bop(t) word is sorta like a game of Twenty Questions, right
down to the "animal / vegetable / mineral" type
noun classes and the conjugation based on size
relative to a breadbox. just like in Twenty
Questions, this still might not be enough information
in some cases, to the extent that some entire
chunks of text can mean multiple, distinct,
equally valid things, with no way to know
which one it is other than context.
very impressively, one particular phrase may
be interpreted either as "all of humanity had one
language. they moved from the east to a plain
in Shinar, and set up things for long
term residence." or as "we are not
strangers to love. you know the rules.
I know the rules. I'm thinking of an entire commitment.
you would not get this from a different guy."
that is an impressive amount of dedication
right there. this isn't even the whole thing! there's a
video available where Swanson reads the entirety of
this passage and it's almost forty minutes long.
there's a link in the description [on some platforms]. Kay(f)bop(t) set out
to be a bad conlang, and, honestly,
I think it's the best possible type of
bad conlang. in fact, I'd go as far as to
say that Kay(f)bop(t) is worse than Ithkuil
is good, technically making Kay(f)bop(t)
the best artlang reviewed so far.
thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time, where
I'll be reviewing Klingon.