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 that, I mean, it’s
not that it’s hard to pronounce the name, it’s more that it’s hard to say its name
out loud in a way that makes it clear what language you’re talking about. Iqglic.
it’s not English, E N G L I S H, it’s Iqglic, spelled I Q G L I C. we’re just
gonna, just gonna have to deal with that. now, if you’ve seen some other episodes
of Conlang Critic, you might have heard of Iqglic before. (that’s Iqglic, not English.)
even if you haven’t, you still might have heard of Vötgil.
Vötgil was one of the first languages I reviewed in this series. at the time, it was a bit
exciting, because it was a first in a few ways. I dunked on Vötgil pretty hard in that
review, and it held the title of my least favorite conlang until the Poliespo episode
from earlier this year. Vötgil is an amature international auxiliary language created by
Jack Eisenmann in 2012. in short, it’s a language where every word is three letters
long and borrowed from English. and actually, in this case, the distinction between the
two languages with names that are pronounced like /ɪŋɡlɪʃ/ isn’t as important, because
Vötgil, in addition to being based on English (the natural language), was more directly
based on Jack Eisenmann’s earlier project, Iqglic.
man, there’s really no good way to disambiguate these. I asked Jack Eisenmann if there’s
a way to differentiate between them, and he said, quote, “no”. so like, officially,
you just don’t. oh, by the way, he wanted me to make it clear that he doesn’t actually
still care about this language. he abandoned Iqglic almost a full decade ago, and hasn’t
spent any time at all on it since.
okay, right, Iqglic is an international auxiliary language created by Jack Eisenmann in 2011.
while Iqglic (2011) appears to be a modified version of English (1550-present), it’s
more accurate to describe it as a completely new language built from the ground up that
just happens to be based on English. the distinction doesn’t matter that much, but the amount
it matters isn’t none.
Iqglic’s consonants are:
/m n ŋ/ /p t tʃ k/
/b d dʒ ɡ/ /f θ s ʃ h/
/v ð z ʒ/ /w ɹ j/
/l/
this is literally just the English consonant inventory. I guess the marginal phonemes aren’t
here, but like, there’s not much I can really say about this inventory from a design standpoint.
like, sure, I could do my normal thing, maybe even bring back that gameshow segment, and
talk about individual phonemes that make this less suited for an IAL, but it’s not like
each of these consonants was selected individually. this inventory is the way it is because of
exactly one bad decision, the decision to just copy English. and like, that was a bad
idea. don’t do that. the point of an IAL is to be a culturally neutral language that
anyone can learn, and deliberately copying one specific natural language without adjusting
it in any way is the opposite of that.
oh, I guess I should also talk about how my analysis here is technically different from
the way it’s described in the official documentation. so like, a lot of these things aren’t supposed
to be consonant phonemes? like, the affricates are presented as stop-fricative consonant
clusters, and the semivowels are presented as non-syllabic allophones of their corresponding
full vowels. so like, I could reduce this chart to just this instead, but I don’t
think this is really the best way to analyze it.
anyway, Iqglic’s vowels are:
/i ɪ u/ /e ə o/
/æ ɑ/
Iqglic phonology isn’t defined using the International Phonetic Alphabet, so I made
some interpretations. I talked about this in the Vötgil review too, but the way it’s
described, just using examples of English words the vowels appear in without specifying
which pronunciation, would mean that if I wanted to interpret the Iqglic documentation
completely literally, the vowel inventory could look something like this instead.
but that’s not really fair, right. of course this stuff isn’t supposed to be referring
to the way I pronounce these words in particular. it’s supposed to work for everyone, right?
so really, I should analyze them like this, using a broad diaphonemic analysis of English.
so like, however you pronounce the vowel in “bought”, that’s how that vowel is pronounced.
but the thing is, I don’t think that’s really what was intended either.
Jack Eisenmann speaks a dialect of E-N-glish with the cot-caught merger, and I-Q-glic appears
to have been designed without taking into consideration that there exist dialects without
the merger.
I guess I should explain what I mean. so like, here’s eight lexical sets in English. the
General American dialect of English groups them like this, into five different vowel
phonemes. other dialects, like Received Pronunciation, have completely different groupings for these
vowels. like, as you can see here, in RP, BATH, START, and FATHER are all the same vowel
phoneme, but in GA, they’re three separate vowels.
anyway, the cot-caught merger takes the FATHER, LOT, CLOTH, and THOUGHT lexical sets and pronounces
all of them as one thing. merging them, if you will. now, the fact that Iqglic (2011)
incorporates the cot-caught merger isn’t itself a bad thing. I’ve said it many times
before: when learning a new language, it’s a lot easier to adjust to a smaller phonemic
inventory than to a larger one. the problem is that the way it’s implemented is pretty
careless.
the word used to define the pronunciation of this vowel is “bought”, which is a
THOUGHT lexical set word. so, someone looking at this word could pronounce it like /stɔːɹ/,
using their pronunciation of the THOUGHT vowel, and then assume that it’s the word for “store”,
even though it’s actually supposed to be “star”.
this is really just one piece of a much larger problem. Iqglic was very clearly designed
with one specific dialect of English in mind. the vocabulary phonemicizes things like intervocalic
tapping and affrication, things that are definitely not universal among English
speakers.
Iqglic has another problem that we’ve seen before many times: its phonotactics are left
undefined. there’s no set limit to what sequences of phonemes can form valid words.
now, you’d think that since all words in Iqglic are from English that this wouldn’t
be that much of a problem, and yet it really is.
probably the biggest issue this causes is when dealing with syllabicity. the letters
and are ambiguous as to when they’re pronounced as non-syllabic semivowels and
when they’re pronounced as syllabic full vowels. if the official documentation is to
be trusted, then every letter is pronounced one way, so they’re always syllabic. meaning
that this is a four syllable word, pronounced [pæ.u.ɹu.ik].
this leads to an interesting question: what is the true nature of this conlang? is the
true version the way it’s described by the reference grammar, or is it what was intended
by its creator? are mistakes in the official documentation truly part of the language?
is the word for bush really pronounced /bush/?
there’s five words in Iqglic that contain that specific consonant cluster, according
to the official documentation. this is clearly a mistake. all of these were intended to have
/ʃ/ instead, but how much does authorial intent actually matter?
when dealing with language, it’s the speakers who decide what a language truly is, but this
conlang doesn’t have speakers, so there’s no definitive answer.
if you’ve seen the title of my video about English spelling reforms, you’ll know that
I think most English spelling reforms are bad, and that’s because most of them are
like Iqglic (2011). it really is a textbook bad spelling reform. it’s super unintuitive,
and I really don’t like the way it looks. it does that thing where is used for
/tʃ/? I hate that! like, I understand the reasoning behind it, but it does not look
good!
okay, here’s a fun game we can play. this is all words in the language that end with
the letter . just look through them, and try to read them to yourself. don’t think
about it too hard, just get a sense of how you instinctively think these words are pronounced.
now, my guess is that most of you doing that will have made the same mistake. that is,
the first time you see one of these words, you assume that the letter at the end
is pronounced like /u/. it’s not. the letter in Iqglic is pronounced like /ə/ in all
contexts.
this is what I mean by calling this orthography unintuitive. it directly contradicts most
people’s intuition. that actually seems to include Jack Eisenmann himself, funnily
enough: there’s five words in Iqglic that end with the letter , all of which are
from English words that end with schwa.
like, Jack already got it! it makes more intuitive sense for words that end with /ə/ to be spelled
with instead. but since that contradicts the “every letter is pronounced exactly
1 way” thing, it’s gotta be instead.
but also, is every letter pronounced exactly 1 way? this is that same point I was making
before, is Iqglic the language that Jack Eisnemann described, or is it the language he meant
to describe?
Iqglic has another writing system, and there’s no real description of how it works anywhere.
basically, there’s different letter shapes for all the consonants, and what color it
is indicates what vowel comes after it. you can also put one consonant above another,
which makes it so the vowel goes before the consonant instead. it’s a somewhat interesting
idea, but it absolutely does not fit Iqglic phonology, and it definitely has no place
in an international auxiliary language. also, since there’s eight phonemic vowels, the
colors you have to distinguish aren’t nearly distinct enough, especially if you’re colorblind.
grammar is the main thing that separates Iqglic from English. you know, besides the aesthetics.
if you’re familiar with Jack Eisenmann’s later works, Iqglic is a lot like those. there’s
four strictly separate parts of speech: nouns, verbs, “descriptors”, and prepositions.
unlike Jack’s later conlangs, descriptors are only adjectives and adverbs, and not intransitive
verbs.
though, it does say that all verbs are transitive, which is like, obviously wrong, given the
verb “egzist”.
another fun difference between Iqglic and Jack’s later conlangs is that Iqglic actually
has a fully functional set of third person pronouns! I mean, sure, they’re directly
copied from English, but it’s better than literally nothing.
of course, it’s completely fine for a language to not use third person pronouns. the problem
with Vötgil is that it didn’t clarify what you’re supposed to use instead of third
person pronouns.
anyway, Iqglic grammar is pretty simple. what you’re looking at now is the whole thing.
some basic rules about noun phrases, a handful of suffixes, and something about “situation
nouns”.
again, it’s a lot like Jack Eisenmann’s other languages. “situation nouns” are
supposed to be relative clauses. you put quote marks around a verb phrase and now it functions
as a noun. how are you supposed to pronounce them? no idea!
situation nouns are a staple of Eisenmann conlangs, and the way they’re implemented
in Iqglic is absolutely the worst version. this is definitely something that should’ve
been handled with grammatical particles, not punctuation.
what else? oh, I should talk about the correlatives.
Jack uses “correlative” the way Esperantists use the term, as a catch-all for interrogative,
demonstrative, and quantifier pronouns. these so-called “correlatives” are supposed
to be a regularized version of their English counterparts.
so like, if you look at all these in English you’ll probably notice a few clear patterns.
there’s pairs like what/that, when/then, and where/there, and there’s the whole set
of words “everybody, anybody, somebody, nobody, everything, anything, something, nothing”
and so on. so like, you could just try to take those patterns, and force them to work
for absolutely everything.
it’s incredibly silly, and I think it’s my favorite thing Iqglic does. it’s just
as unapologetically artificial as the rest of the language, but at the same time it has
this weird charm to it? it’s like Jack was trying to be as objective and logical as possible
when designing it, and he happened to logically conclude that something this ridiculous was
the correct way to do this.
unsurprisingly, Iqglic vocabulary is completely derived from English. it’s small, but not
minimal, at around two thousand words. it’s not enough words for you to be able to assume
that any given English word definitely has an Iqglic equivalent, but it’s too many
words for it to feel right rephrasing things to get around the holes in the vocabulary.
like, if you want to say “moose” or “beaver” you’re fine, but there’s no words for
“deer” or “raccoon”.
I think most emblematic of the fundamental conceptual problem with Iqglic as an international
auxiliary language is the fact that there’s words for American imperial units, but not
for international metric units.
this is an international auxiliary language that makes absolutely no effort to be culturally
neutral in any capacity. it’s careless at best.
you might have noticed that those words for “inch” and “foot” are both prefixed
with leqx-. this is a part of another of the baffling decisions Iqglic makes. see, Iqglic
avoids having words with multiple meanings, whether they’re from homophones or different
senses of the same original English word. and the way Iqglic avoids this is by just,
picking one meaning as the default, and sticking another word before the other one to disambiguate
it.
so that’s why there’s stuff like pyryid and dotpyryid, tw and kawnttw, or sensr and
badsensr. it’s another clear example of the problem with the design philosophy behind
Iqglic. Jack came up with some general principles that maybe sounded good on paper, then fully
committed to them without considering if the results of those principles actually are good.
the following is a part of a translation of the Tower of Babel, from Genesis, translated
into Iqglic by Jack Eisenmann specifically for this video.
Ðu entuyr rx wuz hav wun leqgwidj and kömn werdz.
Ðu prsnz wuz fuynd u fyld in ðu land uv Cynar djeriq "ðey wuz tcravl frum ðu yst
land".
Ðey wuz sey "Plyz kum. Wy plyz meyk brikz and "entuyr brn ðey"." tw self. Ðey wuz
hav brik for rök and tör for sement.
Ðey ðen sey "Plyz kum. Wy plyz bild u sidy for self and wi "u tawr hav töp in ðu skuy".
Wy plyz meyk neym for self for "nöt iz spredid ovr ðu feys uv ðu entuyr rx"".
all in all, Iqglic is a comprehensive failure. I would call it poorly designed, but calling
it “designed” is an exaggeration. Iqglic was abandoned in favor of what would later
become Vötgil, and looking at Iqglic it’s clear that most of the stuff that’s bad
about Vötgil started here.
this is the third of Jack Eisenmann’s languages I’ve reviewed, and they’re really all
the same thing. Vötgil, Zese, they’re just incremental changes to a fundamentally
flawed starting point.
but really, the problem isn’t in the core of the language, it’s with its presentation.
the Jack Eisenmann conlang does not work at all as an international auxiliary language,
but it doesn’t have to be one! a language with a small-ish core vocabulary and minimal
programming-language-like grammar is a pretty decent foundation for an engineered language,
as long as there’s no pretense of it being designed for international communication.
Iqglic wasn’t the most requested Jack Eisenmann language for me to review. I mean, you saw
how many requests it has, that’s way less than everything else this season. the most
requested one was Pegakibo, Jack’s first conlang. Pegakibo isn’t an auxlang, it’s
a personal language, and it has all the hallmarks of his other languages.
and like, I could have made a video about Pegakibo, and it would literally just be the
Zese episode again but less funny. and that’s the thing, right, because the Zese episode
was just a less funny version of the Vötgil episode. that’s why I decided to review
Iqglic, because at least it’s different in interesting ways.
I don’t wanna keep reviewing Jack Eisenmann’s languages. one half of it is because they’re
all the same so I have fewer interesting things to say every time, and the other half is because
I don’t wanna be mean to the guy. it was one thing when this was a smaller channel
and I didn’t care about things like quality, but it’s another thing entirely now that
I have an actual platform and like, standards.
that in mind, Iqglic is complete garbage.
thanks for watching, and I’ll see you in the Conlang Critic Season Three finale, where
I’ll be reviewing Quenya.
o tawa waso lon sewi laso!
o pilin e suno! tenpo kama la
mi lon wile pi kulupu jan tenpo
hey, so you’re watching past the outro, so I think I can be real with you for a second.
pretty much since I uploaded the Viossa episode, a small but vocal group of people have been
complaining about how I’m not making Conlang Critic as often as I used to. I wouldn’t
really mind it if it was like, accurate? like, hey, I’ve been making Conlang Critic at
a steady pace of once every other month for a whole year now. like, literally what are
you talking about?
I make this show every other month, and I make other stuff between. nothing has changed.
anyway, I’ve got an announcement video coming up about what stuff I’ll be doing after
Season Three is over, so look forward to that.