[slowly] welcome to Conlang Critic, the show that gets facts wrong about- *ahem*
[at normal speed] 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 an engineered set of
lenses, The IS Language.
the name “The IS Language”, capitalized like a title with “IS” in all caps, is
a longer form of this language’s actual name, “IS”, variously written either in
all caps or with just the first letter capitalized. and yes, it’s pronounced exactly the same
as the English word “is”.
anyway, IS is an ongoing art project made by Stuart Davis over the course of several
years, presented online in the form of a youtube video released in 2014. outside of videos
on Stuart’s youtube channel, there’s also a short description of the language on his
website which promises, but does not link to, more to come, and several examples of
things he’s done with the language across his various social media accounts.
The IS Language is a personal philosophical language, designed as a way of thinking about
the world. it’s not for communication, but rather for the expression of emotional experiences.
the emotional experiences IS is made for are specifically difficult to explain in English,
and therefore, Stuart argues, difficult to think about.
IS is designed for personal use in art, and isn’t described anywhere comprehensively,
unless that’s just buried somewhere in one of his Patreon posts. therefore, all the information
about IS I’m using for this review come from these two youtube videos, a handful of
blog posts, and analyzing the corpus of text written in the language. I did make an attempt
to reach out to Stuart for further information, but at the time of writing he hasn’t given
me any. needless to say, this is going to all be far more speculative than I usually
get in these episodes. The IS Language’s consonants are
now, Stuart is happy to point out that he is not a linguist. he’s also happy to point
out that, quote, “by the way, I have a terrible accent in IS”.
given this, I applaud him for actually bothering to use the International Phonetic Alphabet.
now, if you’re familiar with what sorts of consonant inventories are common across
different languages, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that this inventory isn’t
exactly typical.
this inventory seems like one which was created based on what things could sound cool, rather
than building a whole cohesive system. as a result, it’s pretty asymmetric, but that’s
not necessarily a bad thing. after all, natural languages have asymmetric inventories all
the time.
so, yes, despite its irregularities, I can for the most part accept this as being a consonant
inventory which conceivably could show up in a natural language, with the one glaring
exception of that bilabial click.
you know about click consonants, right? they’re not very common, but the languages that they
appear in tend to have a lot of them. as far as I can tell, there are no natural languages
that have exactly one click. and bilabial clicks themselves are uncommon for click consonants.
that’s why that bilabial click is a clear giveaway that Stuart wasn’t exactly worried
about the his language feeling “natural”.
The IS Language’s vowels are
just like the consonant inventory, IS’s
vowel inventory isn’t super cohesive, but it’s not like completely unbelievable or
anything. some things worth noting include how the /i u a/ corners of vowel space are
pretty much avoided outside of diphthongs, how those central vowels sound pretty darn
similar, and how those two high front vowels are literally identical.
I can’t know for sure what the difference between these phonemes is supposed to be.
those subscript numbers are my own addition, because on Stuart’s handy chart here they’re
both transcribed the same way. I’m pretty sure they’re supposed to be different things
and not just one sound written two separate ways, because there’s this whole paragraph
on his blog about how important it is that everything in IS is spelled how it sounds,
and that there’s, quote, “only one sound associated with each phoneme”.
one solution I considered for this issue of differentiating between these two vowels was
to analyze the pronunciations of one of the existing examples of Stuart speaking The IS
Language, which led me to the conclusion that ɪ₂ is probably supposed to be higher than
ɪ₁, but then I remembered that thing he said about how he doesn’t actually speak
it with fully accurate pronunciation, which implies that I can’t actually rely on that.
so, “small capital i subscript 1” and “small capital i subscript 2” is what
they’ll have to be.
I think this phonology suits IS decently enough. it’s clearly an amature creattion, but for
what IS is, it works. it functions as a means of allowing the creation of words that sound
pretty. if it weren’t for that bilabial click, I’d even say I think it’s kinda
decent.
I am, however, somewhat skeptical of if I’m interpreting it as intended. Stuart’s so
called “accent” when speaking IS involves some rather peculiar things, like this specific
vowel being pronounced like a sibilant. does that imply that this is actually supposed
to be /ʒ/, which is written in the IPA with a letter that looks somewhat similar? well,
because these sounds’ qualities are never described, and because Stuart explicitly stated
that his pronunciations aren’t canonical, I’m going to continue to assume that this
is meant to be a central vowel and not a sibilant. one of the main things Stuart’s done with
IS since creating it has been calligraphy using its writing system. I’ve already shown
you this image which defines it.
The IS Language’s alphabet has a pretty nice aesthetic, and the calligraphy that’s
been made with it does indeed look good. it’s somewhat of a featural system, in that similar
sounds are represented with similar letters. once again, the odd one out is the bilabial
click. I know it’s hard to tell, but if you look closely, you just might notice that
the letter of the IS alphabet that represents this sound happens to be exactly the same
thing as the corresponding letter of the International Phonetic Alphabet.
now, maybe this is just a hastily made chart. maybe Stuart accidentally used the wrong character
in his custom IS alphabet font and didn’t notice that the letter ended up displaying
as the default font instead because it’s a letter he’s unfamiliar with. I think that’s
a nicer assumption to make rather than assume that he thought that this specific click letter
would fit in with the rest of this alphabet completely unmodified.
once again, however, since this chart is one of the only publicly available pieces of canon
information about IS, I will proceed as if it were accurate, despite these various things
which appear to be mistakes.
now, IS has a Romanization system, but I couldn’t find a full description of it anywhere, just
individual examples. unfortunately, most examples of Romanized IS are presented without the
same text in the IPA or in the IS alphabet, like this excerpt.
I’m guessing that the trigraph in all of these words is meant to be IS’s only
voiced sibilant, /ʑ/, because none of its components would make sense to be anything
else, but look at that last example! never mind that definition for now, just look
at the way it’s Romanized. j-z-h-i-t-i-h-z-j? in context, it’s significant that this word,
when written in the IS alphabet, is a palindrome, which I guess means that the Romanization
has to be a palindrome too?
you know what, here, I’m gonna make my own Romanization for IS. feel free to use this,
Stuart! so, for consonants, it’s not that hard to
make something mostly sensible with a one-to-one correlation between letters and sounds, but
it’s kinda unintuitive for a typical Anglophonic non-linguist, so we can make a few adjustments
to accommodate for that. I think this works. there’s for the
palatal nasal like in some Romance languages, for the bilabial click because that’s
how you spell the kissing sound “mwah”, and everything else just has an obvious Englishy
way of being spelled. maybe replace with or something, but I think is fine.
vowels are tricker because there’s quite a few of them. the central vowels in particular
are difficult to Romanize, just because of how similar they are. here’s the first idea
I had. there’s a few obvious problems with it. it’s far from intuitive, the digraphs
could be ambiguous in cases, and so on. this is specifically avoiding diacritics, which
the current Romanization also avoids. allowing myself to use diacritics and other
non-ASCII stuff, it’s more manageable to create a Romanization that actually works.
now, due to the relative inaccessibility of the IS alphabet, from here on out I’m going
to be using this Romanization for the example text in this video, along with IPA, and the
official Romanization where it’s available. most texts in IS are left untranslated, and
the few exceptions are translated very loosely. there is also no public IS dictionary, or
for that matter any large list of individual IS words. Stuart has said, quote, “The language
is a work in progress, often in flux, so I don’t post a ton of stuff on line. I hope
to publicly share the lexicon, grammar, allow folks to download the font I use to write
in Is, etc.” so I can assume that eventually this information will be publicly available,
but for now there is simply no way of knowing any meaningful information about IS grammar.
because of this, I’ll be merging the “grammar” portion of this review with the “vocabulary”
portion. if Stuart does end up publishing a reference grammar for IS, I might go back
and redo this episode. for now though, this will have to do.
the vocabulary of IS is the aspect which Stuart Davis has talked about most extensively. creating
words for highly specific experiences is, I believe, the main reason IS exists. Stuart
describes IS vocabulary in terms of its horizontal and vertical dimensions.
what Stuart calls the “horizontal dimension” of a word is the fact that the antonym of
a word can be formed by reversing it. so “yes” is “opa” and “no” is “apo”.
connecting words with their antonyms is a common way of reducing the amount of basic
roots in a conlang. some auxlangs like Esperanto and Vötgil use prefixes for this, and the
musical language Solresol uses the same concept of reversal.
from a philosophical standpoint, reversing a word to get its opposite is a more elegant
way of doing this than using a prefix, because it doesn’t imply either word in the pair
to be the default, or make unintended connections between things within the “antonym” category.
words in IS have two other quote unquote “directions”, which are formed by taking the two other directions
and combining them together. these directions have meanings between the two cardianal meanings
of the root, in a somewhat irregular way. as is to be expected, there aren’t many
examples of this provided. now, it’s important to emphasize that these sets shouldn’t be
thought of as groups of four separate related words, but rather one word, as viewed from
different perspectives. Stuart calls this idea “bundled complementarity”,
and says that something and its opposite sharing a root helps to emphasize their direct relationship
to each other.
bundled complementarity is presented as an alternative to the viewpoint the English language
assumes, which he refers to as “subject/object duality”. now, as someone who knows somewhere
between one and two things about linguistics, this confused me somewhat.
as you know, English makes very little marked distinction between subjects and objects,
only using separate words for pronouns, and otherwise relying entirely on word order.
so what does avoiding subject/object duality mean for IS? is there free word order with
no marked cases? are all verbs treated as reciprocal actions? is IS a language like
Lojban, where it has various grammatical features that are given different names from what they’re
usually given to give the impression that it’s doing something original?
no, if IS does any of these, it’s very quiet about it. the term “subject/object duality”
doesn’t actually have anything to do with the grammatical concepts of the subject and
object of a sentence.
instead, from what I can tell, it refers to a specific way of looking at reality where
everything that isn’t the “self” is lumped together into into one “not-self”
category. the duality is that “I” am the subject, and everything else is an object.
I don’t think there’s anything about the English language which specifically connects
it to this mindset. I also couldn’t find anywhere where Stuart explained why he believes
that the English language has this bias, or why having words and their antonyms be the
same basic root prevents this.
googling “subject/object duality”, however, landed me on an explanation of the general
concept which took “time and space are not objectively real” as a given, a Quora thread
full of people debating weather physical objects are illusory, and a Futurama themed Prezi
slideshow before I found something that explained the connection to language, written by Robert
Wolfe.
quote, “In a sentence structure—“I see a tree”—I, the observer, is the subject
of the sentence; tree, the observed, is the object.Such a sentence presupposes that I
and the tree are separate entities.
We think (in our mind) in sentences.So we habitually separate our self—I—from every
object we see.“I”, the thinker, am the subject of every thought we have—what the
importance of the thought relates to.The object in the thought can be any of the things in
existence, whether material or immaterial.
We divide the world, in our thoughts: there is “me” (always the important subject)
and there is all else in existence that is “not me” (the object of our thoughts).”
this philosophical stuff is extremely far removed from my wheelhouse. while I, conditioned
to think of everything dualistically, might think of this as being a separate wheelhouse,
my wheelhouse being a subject and this wheelhouse being an object, this is only an illusion,
and they are in fact the same wheelhouse, as are all wheelhouses, and everything which
is not a wheelhouse.
in The IS Language, instead of distinguishing between “in my wheelhouse” and “outside
my wheelhouse”, one is encouraged to be conscious of the fact that they are the same
thing by... distinguishing between “in my wheelhouse” and “esuohleehw ym ni”.
allegedly perpendicular to IS’s horizontal dimension is its vertical dimension. roots
in IS can take one of seven affixes to indicate level of “altitude”, or the depth of perception.
this is a suffix for inversion one and a prefix for inversion two.
so, what does any of this even mean? quote, “Altitudes in Is are a depth inflection.
Whereas most inflections denote person, number, gender, case- in Is there is a category of
vertical value. Like inches, the altitude itself is empty. Inches could measure anything,
rain, a person’s height, the depth of soil, or the lenght of a fully erect penis.
...[altitudes] folow a transcend-include succession (Integral Semiotics) so the second altitude
always transcends but includes the first, the third always transcends but includes the
second, and so on.”
I’m not so sure about that, however. sure, I can see why you’d say an emotional state
transcends a physical state, but does it always include a physical state?
there are even fewer examples of this system explained than there are showing the horizontal
dimension. I have no idea how I would generalize these extremely specific definitions into
something that can be applied to literally any noun, which might just be the point.
maybe this system is meant as a way to get Stuart thinking about things and what it means
to experience them at all of these different levels. if that’s the case, translating
this system into English, or indeed explaining how it works to anyone in any way, is impossible,
because what these levels of depth mean is an extremely personal thing.
the following is the longest piece of text in IS I could find alongside an English translation.
it’s a poem featured in the video THE ART OF IS, uploaded by Stuart Davis in 2018. there’s
a link to the video in the description, if you’re interested in hearing the specifically
non-canonical pronunciation of this text. aupo gneushau ed airuëur
aupo gneushau ed airəmi aupo gneushau ed aisotho
oailyd ä·aiujair argnoma argnomashe əgno ëəthumashu
əgnmira (oisil) odushau ëethosu
and you know what, yeah, that's exactly what it's supposed to sound like.
yeah, nailed it. perfect. all in all, constructed languages are a diverse
artform, and they are used for many things. an auxiliary language is a tool. a fictional
language is a story. an engineered language is a demonstration.
what then is IS? IS is a personal language. personal languages typically don’t reach
wide audiences, because they typically make no efforts to advertize themselves. a personal
language has a target audience of one.
if IS has helped specifically Stuart Davis see the world in a new way that’s been beneficial
to his artistic process, then IS has succeeded. what criticism can I even give it without
knowing Stuart at a deep personal level?
I don’t want to be mean. Stuart Davis isn’t a public figure. IS isn’t a very well known
conlang. I’d love to see Stuart make more things in IS, clarify the aspects of it which
are unclear from what he’s already posted, define its grammar, post a dictionary. IS
clearly means something to him that it simply cannot mean to anyone else.
I say this not because I think IS is beyond criticism. I do not think IS is very well
made from a technical standpoint, and it being a personal language doesn’t negate that.
rather, IS being a personal language is important context for understanding how much my opinion
is worth.
that said, I strongly dislike IS. it has a couple of good ideas, but those ideas are
explored more through philosophy than through conlanging. and most information that does
exist about it as a language is either inaccessible or nonsensical.
I do not like IS, but maybe that’s just because I’m judging it through tiny details
posted about it during its development. as I said, I’m willing to redo this episode
in the future if Stuart Davis ever publishes a full reference grammar for IS.
thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next time, where I’ll be reviewing Drsk.
tenpo mute la, mi tu li lon poka ni li nasin taso lon tenpo
sina olin pakala, li tawa anpa taso, sina awen pilin pona
I want to make this sound good.
this is me trying myself to make-
this is me trying my hardest to make this sound good.
it's a poem- I mean, it's poetry.
it should sound good.
this is genuinely me trying to make it sound good.
I'm gonna- I mean, just like-
okay.