Thank you to Ita Ash, otherwise known as jcbk, xavo,
and probably others for requesting this episode.
Welcome to Conlang Critic, the show that gets facts wrong about your favorite conlang.
I'm jan Misali, and in this episode, well, you know what Zese!
Zese, that's the episode we're doing.
Zese was created in 2015 by Jack Eisenmann
who you might remember as the Vötgil guy
from episode three.
The goal of Zese is to, quote,
"...balance minimalism and efficiency."
It was based on several of Eisenmann's other languages
which he helpfully explains in this chart
It's kind of concerning knowing from the gecko knowing that Vötgil,
which has been listed as the worst interlang reviewed on this show for an entire year
was one of the main inspirations for Zese.
Needless to say, my expectations aren't the highest they've ever been.
But, putting all that aside, let's take a look at the phonology.
Zese's consonants are:
/b/, /d/, /g/
/p/, /t/, /k/,
/z/, /s/
This inventory is small.
Even smaller than Toki Pona's,
but that doesn't make it good.
For example, there aren't any nasals,
even though /m/ is literally the single most common sound cross-linguistically.
Within a rounding error, literally everyone can pronounce it,
and even though Zese lacks sounds that are extremely common,
it also makes some pretty uncommon distinctions.
The most notable being, between /s/ and /z/.
A distionation absent from major world languages
like Mandarin, Spanish, and Bengali.
Not to mentional languages like Tamil, that don't have any sort of voicing distinction at all.
Zese's vowels are:
/i/, /u/, /e/, /o/, /a/.
This may or may not be how those vowels are actually pronounced.
Jack Eisenmann did use IPA symbols for them, but he also gave English example
words the sounds appear in, which would mean that they're pronounced like this.
Not knowning what sounds are in his own languages is sort of a recurring theme in
Jack "glotal approximant" Eisenmann's work.
Maybe I should give him the benefit of the doubt
and assume that those are just approximations for English speakers,
but you know what Zese by playing devil's advocate.
The orthography of Zese is, well,
every sound is written the same as in the IPA,
but it's in all caps is the thing.
The result is that Zese looks like it's yelling at me, which I do not appreciate.
What did I ever do to you?
I mean, besides endlessly mock Vötgil.
Okay, maybe I do deserve to get yelled at for that, just a little.
For some reason, there's also two words that get written with punctuation:
kida and kidu.
we'll get back to those later, but
for now, all that matters is that they're dumb and I hate them.
In addition to the Latin alphabet, Zese can be written with a conscript
made by Eisenmann himself.
All the graphemes are made of simple lines, which is a huge aesthetic
improvement over Vötgil's base-4-Minecraft-optimized-grayscale thing.
However, it does this weird thing
where every grapheme for a vowel can also represent a consonant,
which might sound like an objectively bad idea,
but it doesn't lead to any ambiguity thanks to
the syllable structure.
So instead of being objectively bad, it's just subjectively bad.
See, every syllable is one consonant and one vowel.
This means the words don't have any consonant clsters
whatsoever.
One one hand, this is really good because
the CV syllable structure is the only one you can guarantee your speakers will be able to pronounce.
The thing is, every word is exactly two syllables long,
which means that everything feels samey and really monotonous.
It's very easy to get lost in blocks of text
The only exception to this are loan words,
which sound different from everything else because they're straight-up English words.
How am I even supposed to pronouce that?
Is it just how it's pronounced in English?
If so, why a loan from English specifically?
And how would you write that if you're not using the Latin alphabet?
Zese's script doesn't have letters that correspond to h, n, or r, so you just wouldn't be able to,
and you know what Zese about languages with no repair strategies.
The vocabulay is small at 275 words.
From a minimalist standpoint, this is an improvement over Vötgil
which has either 600 or 609 words depending on how good you are at counting.
but it still has the problem of not knowing what words are necessary
Of course, bag and container are separate words, but
arm and neck are the same.
Of course, Zese was made years after Vötgil,
which means Eisenmann was able to learn from his foolish beginner's mistakes.
For example, Vötgil completely lacks the third person pronouns,
which is ridiculous and not something you would ever do twice.
So, in Zese, the third person pronouns are
also completely absent! There just, aren't any!
What the entire heck, Jack Eisenmann. There's no way that was an accident.
Jack Eisenmann intentionally excluded
third person pronouns for basically no reason at all.
There's no way you wouldn't eventually run into a sentence where third person pronouns are necessary.
You know, like, the reference grammar has
an example sentence which include third person pronouns.
What are they even translating?
Okay, I checked, and they use "susu," which means thing.
Actually, that's not fair. It specifically means
the most general noun.
Hey Jack, do you know what the most general type of noun is?
It's called a heckin pronoun, you goofus.
Zese's grammar claims to be simple, which
is a pretty generous description.
It certainly is consistent with how its grammar works,
but that results in constructions that aren't very languagey.
Uh, linguistic?
It... it doesn't seem like a language is my point.
Okay, so remember those words that are written with brackets from earlier:
kida and kidu?
They're used for a grammatical feature called "situation nouns"
which real linguists would call "relative clauses."
Now, natural languages would do this
using a word that indicates the beginning of a
relative clause and leave it at that.
But Zese is under the impression that you also need to mark where the clause ends.
That's where the brackets come in.
The opening bracket essentially means "that,"
and the closing bracket is straight-up spoken punctuation.
This might not sound so bad, but
once you get to more complicated sentences
it gets hard to keep track of what anything is supposed to mean.
I'm honestly having a hard time telling what's going on here.
I think brackets are being used both as
quote marks and actual grammatical features?
The fact that they're written with brackets makes it feel even less natural
than it would already.
Also, more importantly, actually pronouncing them
is entirely optional,
Which means that if someone says "biki,"
they could be saying "see" or "sight," and you'd have no way of knowing which one it is.
Here's a fun fact:
Zese actually has a second set of brackets.
They're not explained on the main grammar page,
but in a hidden link at the bottom of the vocabulary list.
That's right; Zese literally has a secret grammatical feature
that you're just supposed to know exists somehow.
Okay, so, what do the parentheses do?
I mean, surely if they're so secret,
they can't be important or anything, right?
Well apparently, their function is to make it so words cannot be
modified by outside words.
Basically, they just function as a conjunction
like and, but for some reason, they're's two of them again.
*sigh*
You know what, Zese? I don't even think you're even trying to act like a language.
It's like you're a programming language that murdered a spoken language
and is wearing its skin.
All in all, Zese isn't a good language.
Nothing about it feels like how languages feel.
Zese tries to be logical
and produces unintuitive nonsense.
It isn't minimalist, and it certainly isn't efficient.
That in mind, I'd say that I like Zese more than I like Vötgil
but not as much as I like Interlingua,
making it the 11th best interlang reviewed so far.
Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time,
where I'll be reviewing Futurese.
*Vötgil diss track*
Hey everyone, jan Misali here with a little housekeeping.
Sorry this episode took so long to make
I wanted it to come out months ago,
but real life got in the way, so obviously that didn't happen.
Thank you for understanding.
Also, a huge thanks to everyone who kept giving me money
through Patreon every month even after that huge dry spell
without any new stuff.
Seriously, it means a lot to me.
I wish I could say that I'll be able to speed production up
a little, but I really can't guarantee that.
You know how it is.
Anyway, as you can see on the screen, there's four episodes left on
the small list.
After the Folkspraak episode is released
I'll reveal what languages will be covered in Episodes 25 though 36.
Think of it as a Season 3.
Nothing is set in stone yet,
but looking at the current plan,
we're gonna be looking at some pretty notable languages from
some big names in the conlang community.
So, look forward to that, probably sometime in early 2018.
/ʇ/