thank you to Ian Foster 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, we'll
be looking at the language that's Greenlandic, but for
wolves, Wolflandic. Wolflandic is
an artlang created by Ian Foster in
2016, and was heavily influenced by
Greenlandic. you might've noticed that Ian Foster
also happens to be the person who requested
this episode. technically, he requested that I
review either Wolflandic or Hardonian, but
Wolflandic is the more popular of the two, so I went with that one.
the point is, Ian Foster is watching
this, which means I can address him directly.
that said, hi, Ian! I hope you're ready for some
constructive criticism. I know you're
currently working on New Wolflandic, so
hopefully I can give you some advice on how to make that
as good as possible. as usual, I'm starting with the
phonology. Wolflandic's consonants are:
the phonology is the only aspect of Wolflandic where the changes
made for New Wolflandic are currently available,
so here are the consonants for New Wolflandic.
wait, what? is this
really what you wanted? okay,
so, first of all, you really need to
use the IPA. the IPA makes conlanging
so much easier! like, you have
six alveolar stops in New Wolflandic,
and I cannot for the life of me tell
what the difference between t' and
d' is. to me, it really sounds
like you're making the same sound for both of them,
but if you used the IPA to define them,
I'd be able to tell exactly what sounds they're
supposed to be. second of all, why do you have six
alveolar stops? seriously,
you only have one bilabial stop and only one
uvular stop, so why do you have so many
alveolar stops? you wanted to make
Wolflandic like an Eskimo language, right?
well, fun fact about Eskimo languages:
there isn't a single one with six alveolar
stops. in fact, the overwhelming majority,
including Greenlandic, have exactly
one. I think you may have overthought this
just a little bit. okay, if you ever decide you wanna
reredo Wolflandic's inventory, here's a good
set of consonants for you to start with. the ones
in italics are the ones where it makes just as much
sense to keep them as it does to remove them. honestly,
most of the changes you made for New Wolflandic's
consonants make a lot of sense, like getting rid of the
glottal stop, and merging tz
with ts, but the new stop sounds are
really, really extraneous. okay, now for the
vowels.
and here's the vowels used in
New Wolflandic. I'm not including
the diphthongs, by the way. these vowels aren't nearly as
messy as the consonants. personally, I
would've gone with a three vowel system, but this
still works. I don't actually have that much to say about the
orthography. it's pretty straightforward. a
couple of things are a little weird, but it's all completely
naturalistic. no real complaints there. alright,
let's look at the grammar. one of the main features of
Wolflandic is that it's polysynthetic, so
entire phrases are combined into single words.
for example, "the quick brown fox jumped over
the lazy dog" is
"xeoalloqunuqangahucaxa ova
xeohundawïqti", a sentence
with three words, which mean "the quick brown
fox jumped", "over", and "the lazy dog".
this system produces these long,
intimidating words that are actually quite simple
if you know how to break them down. the only problem I
have with it is that under the surface
it's pretty Englishy. if you put spaces between
the roots in these words, the sentence would be almost
one to one with its English equivalent!
the last thing to look at is the vocabulary.
Wolflandic's vocabulary is kinda weird.
there's a whole lot of words that are taken directly
from other languages, mainly English
and Esperanto. I'm assuming that
this was to make it easier to learn? it doesn't
really matter, but it would be great if the
vocabulary was either completely original or
completely borrowed, rather than a weird mix between
the two. that brings us to a new segment on the show
called "how you can conlang better next time",
which will replace the ranking section on episodes
about languages made by people in the audience.
so, Ian Foster, here's how you can
conlang better next time. first, keep
the phonology simple. the more sounds you have, the harder
things will be. second, don't be afraid to mix
things up a little. try to specifically exclude
features that are in English, and see what things
you can come up with to replace them. third,
make sure you know who you're making your language for,
and allow every step of the language making process to
be informed by what you think they'd like the most.
this applies even more if it's a language you're making
for your own use. and fourth, I'm serious
dude you gotta use the IPA. it makes things
so much easier! thanks for watching, sorry about
the wait, and I'll see you next time, where I'll be
reviewing Kay(f)bop(t).