welcome to Conlang Critic,
the show that gets facts wrong about YOUR favorite conlang!
I'm jan Misali, and the good news is that my opinions about this one are gonna be real non controversial,
because we'll be looking at the Language of Space,
*tries to pronounce aUI*
yeah, we're looking at aUI.
aUI was made by the late Dr. W. John Weilgart in 1962 as a universal form of communication
made entirely out of semantic primes.
much like my personal favorite language, Toki Pona,
aUI has a tiny base vocabulary,
and in order to say anything, you need to break it down into its fundamental concepts.
the thing that makes aUI stand out is that
each of its thirty one morphemes is a single phoneme in length.
that way, if two words sound similar, they'll have similar meaning as well.
as a result though, it has a pretty big phonemic inventory.
I mean, not like unreasonably big, but depending on your first language, it might be a little hard to manage.
oh, here, I'll make a table for you.
that'll be a lot easier than me just articulating all of them in alphabetical order.
so the consonants are:
a rhotic sound which can be pronounced as either /r/ or /ʀ/,
this is a pretty ordinary set of consonants. it's actually almost identical to the one we saw in the first episode,
and all the problems there apply here, too. I won't talk about them though, because
what the heck is going on with the vowels?!
this is a complete mess!
oh yeah, and also all the vowels except /œ/ can be nasalized as part of the numbering system.
that is entirely too many vowels.
that's like English levels of vowels.
those of you who are good at counting will notice that even though I said aUI has
thirty one morphemes, one phoneme in length each,
aUI has twenty consonants, twelve vowels, and eleven nasal vowels,
and you might wonder where the extra twelve phonemes came in.
well, for one, the word for negation can be pronounced either as /j/ or /y/,
so that's just forty two total, [friendly reminder about the Lojban word for 42]
and apparently the nasal vowels just don't count because they're only for numbers
even though they appear in normal words all the time.
okay, to Weilgart's credit, I guess having an unreasonable amount of phonemes is kinda unavoidable if you want one phoneme per root,
but he could've at least looked into what sounds were the most common cross linguistically?
at least they have basic enough meanings.
like, really basic meanings.
so basic that most of them have no meaning on their own.
here, lemme show you.
of course, since the roots have really, really basic meanings,
a word can have pretty much any of these in any order with almost no restrictions.
for example, the word for "win" is "pnev".
now, you might be looking at this writing system with its mixed case and be thinking,
"wow, this looks really dumb! why would anyone use this?"
the answer is that it's not meant to be used.
it's actually a Romanization for the real writing system,
which, due to the way aUI works, is both an alphabet and a logography.
each symbol reflects its meaning, while still being abstract enough to be open for variation.
it's a pretty decent writing system, so it's a shame that it isn't computer friendly,
meaning practically all materials in aUI are made with the garbage Latin version.
apparently, in 2014, the Cosmic Communication Foundation started existing,
and made a new and improved version of aUI's vocabulary,
and now, I can't find the original!
I can't even find a changelog of all the things that have changed since the original!
like, I was able to find multiple people talking about how aUI's word for "man" is "vu", meaning "active human",
and how its word for "woman" is "Yvus", meaning "inactive human sort of thing",
which is like extremely sexist!
in the updated version, the word for "man" is "tonvomu", meaning "seed making human",
and the word for "woman" is "gomLu", meaning "human capable of carrying life".
I mean, it's still pretty sexist but at least it doesn't imply that women are objects?
casual 1960's sexism aside,
aUI's vocabulary seems to mostly be based on metaphor.
for example, the word for "banana" is "a*nkot", or
"one quantity above life towards".
on one hand, this makes it pretty hard to guess what a word means, even if you know what all its parts mean individually,
therefore meaning that these compound words are really morphemes in their own right, and not just combinations of other morphemes.
on the other hand, and this is the Tokiponist in me talking here,
there really is something about breaking a word down into its basic parts that's a really intriguing exercise.
so, it's not a fundamentally flawed idea, it's just the execution that doesn't work.
so, grammar.
aUI grammar is, in a word, Englishy.
it's not the Englishiest it could've been,
but aUI verbs have past participle and past perfect forms,
which isn't super common outside of Germanic languages.
oh, and unlike in other Germanic languages (but quite a bit like in English),
aUI has a suffix that you put on adjectives to turn them into adverbs!
since it's kind of hard to find information about aUI online, I don't really have that much else to say about it,
so let's go into the ranking bit!
this is only the second episode, so the only question I need to ask is
weather I like aUI more or less than I like Lojban.
so, if we're only talking about the ideas behind the language,
I'd definitely say that oligosynthesis is a better basis for a language than predicate logic.
however, talking about the whole package,
then aUI is noticeably worse than Lojban in nearly every other category.
its Romanization system is buttugly,
its words are hard to pronounce and harder to understand,
and its grammar is Anglocentric.
most importantly, though, when looking at the goals of each language,
aUI wants to be universal while Lojban wants to be [structurally] unambiguous,
and Lojban, regardless of its other flaws,
does manage to be [structurally] unambiguous,
but nothing about aUI is even remotely universal!
all that in mind, aUI is the second best conlang reviewed so far.
*quietly* yeah, I can work with that.