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 language of the heavens, Drsk.
“Drisk”? hmm. yeah, I’m going with “Dursk”.
Drsk is a fictional language created by Isoraķatheð Zorethan, who has been posting about it online
since early 2017. Isoraqathedh is a conlanger and worldbuilder based in Hong Kong, and he’s
made an impressive amount of conlangs. Drsk is one of many.
information about Drsk has been cross-posted on his reddit, twitter, and tumblr accounts.
before I started researching for this review, Isoraq reached out to me through tumblr and
very kindly sent me an in-progress reference grammar for Drsk, which has been an extremely
valuable resource.
fictionally, Drsk is spoken in the country...
Kl-, Klssr-, uh, “Kolsserdmook” on the planet Pasaru, by a humanlike species called
kilis. while kilis are similar to humans, they aren’t exactly the same, and the languages
they speak highlight these differences. Drsk itself is particularly alien, but is it far
enough from everything we’re used to to be sure to make linguists claim that it is
the language of the heavens?
Drsk’s consonants are:
well! that’s uh, certainly something! where do I even start with this?
well, I should probably reiterate that Drsk isn’t spoken by humans, so the fact that
this inventory is weird shouldn’t be surprising. regardless, there are still some things here
that bug me.
first of all, there’s this thing transcribed in the IPA as v tiebar n, which is referred
to as a “nasal dental affricate”. I don’t know what it’s supposed to be, but none
of the options I’m thinking of are affricates.
in general, this inventory is just really asymmetric. I know I say that a lot, but for
Drsk, there really isn’t any way of looking at these consonants without something looking
out of place.
like, why are there no phonemes here that are both aspirated and palatalized? it leaves
both features feeling incomplete, not allowing them to interact.
Drsk’s vowels are:
yeah, that’s right, Drsk doesn’t have any phonemic vowels! how bizarre!
this is, however, rather misleading. Drsk does have vowels, they’re just inserted
between consonants in a way that’s largely regular and predictable. but before we get
into that, we need to talk about the phonorun.
one of the more significant things when discussing the phonology of a spoken language is its
syllable structure, what sequences of phonemes can make up a syllable. however Drsk, apparently,
doesn’t have syllables! instead, it has something that Isoraq calls “phonoruns”.
phonuruns, or just “runs”, are an alternative to syllables created for Isoraq’s earlier
languages, such as Rattsaw, fictionally spoken in the same region as Drsk.
basically, the idea is that a phonorun is a sequence of similar sounds grouped together.
while a syllable has some sound, typically a vowel, as its nucleus, surrounded by consonants
on either side, a phonorun has no internal structure, and its sounds can only be considered
one unit due to their shared features.
there is no limit for how long a phonorun can be, or what order its sounds can occur
in.
due to this defining lack of structure, I don’t think it makes literally any sense
to use phonoruns as a way of defining a language’s phonotactics. they are completely arbitrary
and don’t add any more information about a language’s sound system than simply claiming
that there are no restrictions for what order phonemes may appear in.
in Drsk, phonoruns work differently from how they do in languages like Rattsaw. Drsk’s
phonemes are divided into categories of similar sounds, but instead of a phonorun consisting
of a sequence of sounds within any one category, some phonemes are labeled as “terminators”,
which immediately end the current run.
here, I’ve highlighted all the terminating phonemes. the ones in darker red can function
either as terminators or non-terminators. as you can see, the terminators actually outnumber
the non-terminators.
anyway, that stuff doesn’t really matter, since the vowel insertion rules pretty much
negate all of this.
so, while vowels can in theory be freely inserted in Drsk, since they don’t carry any meaning,
there are in fact rules for where they usually go. and this is where everything falls apart.
this is Drsk’s normal syllable structure.
this syllable structure is defined explicitly as part of Drsk’s vowel insertion rules,
and as far as I can tell, it does not in any way interact with phonoruns.
which vowel gets inserted is determined by the following consonant, with some room for
dialectal variation. Drsk, however, basically has these nine vowels phonetically.
true, they’re not phonemic, and yes, you can predict where within a word they show
up. but like, come on. the claim that Drsk is a language without vowels or even syllables
is pretty inaccurate, don’t you think?
Drsk is written using an alphabet created for that Rattsaw language I mentioned earlier.
in fiction, Drsk hasn’t used it for very long, so its orthography is completely phonemic.
it’s kinda boring, but I guess it makes sense.
what doesn’t make sense is the fact that Drsk’s vowels aren’t written. I get that
they’re not phonemic, but vowels are phonemic in Rattsaw! the alphabet Drsk uses has letters
for vowels. it would make more sense if the writing system Drsk borrowed from was an abjad
or an abugida or something where it’s normal to not write vowels that can be inferred through
context, but not for an alphabet.
then there’s the Romanization which I guess is technically a fully defined Romanization.
that’s more than I can say for some other conlangs I’ve seen recently. those superscript
letters all over the place used to be digraphs, but since there’s a risk of ambiguity the
digraphs all had their second letters superscripted. personally, I’d’ve gone with the humble
interpunct instead to solve this.
now, a lot of things here don’t make very much sense and aren’t very helpful, but
since Drsk uses the Rattsaw alphabet, it’s actually just the same Romanization used for
Rattsaw copied directly. so things that don’t make sense for Drsk do make sense for Rattsaw.
so while double s for /ʃ/ might not make very much sense and it would’ve been more
useful to write it like sh or x, in Rattsaw this same letter was used for the sound /t͡s̆/,
which,
wait hold on, it doesn’t make any sense for that either! what’s even going on here!
you know what, this is like the least important thing about this language so I’m just gonna
move on.
nouns in Drsk are a closed class due to their highly structured nature. there really isn’t
any room for new nouns to be created.
a Drsk noun consists of a prefix for grammatical gender, a basic root, and a suffix for case.
now, Drsk’s grammatical gender system is extremely complex. grammatical gender consists
of three parts, the supermajor category, major category, and minor category. this is essentially
a three-layer taxonomy of nouns.
so, as an example, here’s the word for iron.
the basic root here is actually just the letter p. the d at the start means the supermajor
category is “material”, the weird not-affricate thing means the major category is “solid
metallic”, and then the double-s-h thing means the minor category is “usable”.
the last consonant is the case suffix.
this reminds me of Ithkuil, a language I like a lot specifically for how densely it packs
information. but Ithkuil is an engineered language, specifically aiming to have as much
information per phoneme as possible. Drsk is a fictional language, and Isoraq expects
me to believe that this system could conceivably develop naturally.
well, Drsk definitely couldn’t be a natural human language, but perhaps the kilis who
speak Drsk simply have brains that work completely different from humans. who’s to say how
likely this is in universe? I can see why someone else might be able to suspend their
disbelief for this, I just can’t.
nouns end with suffixes indicating their case. there are nine total, some covering a few
different cases.
the “transitive” case there is used for both subjects and objects of transitive verbs.
this is one of the rarest morphosyntactic alignments in human languages, often overlooked
when discussing the concept.
not nominative-accusative or ergative-absolutive, but transitive-intransitive. it’s a pretty
cool way to do it.
pronouns basically work by removing the word’s root, leaving only the case and gender information.
this actually works for all types of words, not just nouns.
there’s three other prowords that exist, which aren’t supposed to be general first
second and third person pronouns, but like, they kinda are.
so, the velar nasal word can be used as a replacement of whatever, which makes sense
because the normal prowords are often not that much shorter than the words they’re
replacing. it also makes sense to not label this as an actual third person pronoun, since
it can take the place of any word.
but then there’s the other two. the first means the “author” and the second means
the “audience”. when defining them, Isoraq claims, quote, “these don’t necessarily
correspond to the first & second person pronouns.”
they totally do though. the alleged difference is that when you’re talking about something
someone else said before you, the “author” pronoun refers to that person, and the “audience”
pronoun refers to whoever they were talking to. I don’t know what about this makes these
no longer first and second person pronouns.
an example Isoraq uses to demonstrate this difference is a sentence explaining what Dora
the Explorer is about. as we all know, in English it would make no sense to say something
like “Dora the Explorer teaches you the alphabet”. I mean, you’d have to be, quote,
“particularly dim” not to see that, ha ha!
in direct contrast with the highly structured nouns, verbs in Drsk are far less structured.
Isoraq uses an analogy where verbs are water, and nouns are islands in the water. verbs
can in general go basically anywhere within a sentence, except for the verb f, which means
“and”.
yes, that’s a verb.
one term used in the description of Drsk is “dredge”, which Marriam-Webster defines
as “an apparatus usually in the form of an oblong iron frame with an attached bag
net used especially for gathering fish and shellfish”, or “a machine for removing
earth usually by buckets on an endless chain or a suction tube”. what could this possibly
mean in a linguistic context?
Isoraq refers to “inflectionless dredge morphemes”, “verblike dredge”, and “relational
superdredge”. they’re basically just grammatical particles. they’re mostly used for tense
aspect and mood information. I have no idea why they need a neologism.
Isoraqathedh is a wordlbuilder, and discussing Drsk as a language without also discussing
the culture it exists within is definitely selling it short. reading through his blog
for the purposes of this review, I found descriptions of color perception, road signage, timekeeping,
and calculus.
of course, you all know me and what I’m into so let’s take a quick look at Drsk’s
numbers.
the numbering system in Drsk uses something called a “state machine” to construct
its digits. each digit is formed starting with two, using the operators “double”,
“triple”, and “decrement”. so, the word for “seven” literally means “one
less than twice twice two”.
this system is the sort of thing you’d get from a culture that invented math before inventing
counting. and all digits work this way, even the smallest ones: zero is “one less than
one less than two”,
one is “one less than two”,
three is “one less than twice two”, and so on.
this is not, however, used for all numbers, just the digits. and the digits are, I’m
sorry to say, from zero to eleven, because Drsk uses base twelve.
not only does Drsk use base twelve, but if you ignore the way the digits are constructed,
it uses base twelve in the most boring possible way, just listing the digits of a number in
dozenal in order with from most to least significant.
yeah sure, there is more to it than that, and indeed Drsk does have support for other
bases, even including seximal,
but that doesn’t change how uh, constructed it feels.
one aspect of Drsk that’s really informative of what its speakers’ culture is like is
how it handles names of individuals.
a name consists of four parts, referred to as “status”, “origin”, “commune”,
and “unit”.
the “status”, as the name suggests, refers to the general state of whoever you’re talking
about, in terms of their wellbeing and what role in society they have relative to you.
so, there’s “fitness”, ranging all the way from someone in their prime to someone
who’s dead, combined with “engagement”, which is basically weather or not whoever
you’re talking about has an active role in society, combined together with one of
five “castes”.
like a lot of things in Drsk, the names used for the castes aren’t very helpful. specifically,
“relative inferior” is actually the default, the one you’d use when talking about your
peers. “equal” is less about actually being of equal status to the speaker and more
of a neutral option for when you don’t want to specify caste.
next, there’s the “origin”, two letters referring to where the individual is from,
usually a shortened form of the name of the place itself.
finally, “commune” and “unit”, which are basically just the family name and personal
name parts of the name, though the “commune” part of the name is more about who you hang
out with than it is about who you’re related to.
this somewhat complex name system is a good indicator of what values the kilis who speak
Drsk have. whenever they talk about someone and want to use their full name, it’s important
to them to indicate their level of health, where they’re from, and who they spend time
with.
there’s one more aspect of Drsk speaking culture that I should probably mention here.
so, on Pasaru, the planet Drsk is spoken on, the most common type of fiction is something
called “worldstate literature”, defined by a lack of characters.
so, rather than stories that are based around some protagonist and the things that happen
to them, the “plot” found in worldstate literature is more big-picture. the star isn’t
the characters, but the setting. highly detailed descriptions of fictional worlds and the cultures
within them, with no need for a three act structure or a conflict that gets resolved.
for Isoraq’s target audience of his fellow worldbuilders and conlangers, this provides
the escapist fantasy of a world where the type of thing you make is what everyone is
into! can you imagine?
at least, that’s what I assume worldstate literature is supposed to be. when Isoraq
talks about his motivations behind the idea of worldstate literature, he doesn’t make
this comparison to worldbuilding himself.
in his essay, A Case Against the Character, Isoraq not only explains why he believes that
stories without characters have potential, but also why he dislikes characters in general.
I’ll put a link in the description if you’re interested, but his main argument seems to
be that, one, you’re supposed to empathize with characters, two, characters can change
how they behave over time, and three, things in the story happen specifically to put characters
in interesting situations. and so that’s what he doesn’t like about characters. I
guess.
the following text is titled The Horse and the Stone, an allegory posted on tumblr by
Isoraqathedh in March 2017. ironically, it’s a straightforward story with a protagonist
and a moral.
pmᵘglˡtʲ klˡptʲ f nkⁱhsˢsˢrtʲ nᵘs. klˡptʲ pmᵘglˡtʲ z ksmᵘlˡptʲ pmᵘzkglˡtʲ.
dᵘrf vᵉm kt pmᵘt cstrzł. ft cť zkⁱrⁱstp pť kshl. dᵈd pť lzftᵗmᵘvᵉrⁱlˡ
pþr. ft kⁱrⁱstp pt nt vpþr cᶜckʲ rcᶜrⁱ
cᶜv rv. ħŋ. ft vkfr nt.
ħn s. bcfp þʲcft nt þʲrðr pt kt fs. dᵘdčyðtᵗkᵏtᵗt f pt kt zm rⁱgᵍ.
all in all, Drsk is a disappointment. it does have its charms, and I understand why someone
else might like it, but it’s not my thing. as I’ve said before, a fictional language
is a story, and the story of Drsk is one that I have a hard time relating to. I can appreciate
the effort that went into it, but most of the things Drsk has going for it would be
better suited to an engineered language, not a fictional language.
thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next time, where I’ll be reviewing Sambahsa.