thank you to Robert Nielsen, Anon525, miguelceromil, thelabyrinthmaker, almayim, Leery L2F2, Morphimus,
QWERQY, Matheus D. Rodrigues, robbie, tangerines, FishyCuber, and probably others for requesting
this episode.
also, thank you to jan Awalo for providing some of the audio.
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 universal musical language,
Solresol.
I mean, (singing) Solresol.
that’s a word that just means “language”! anyway, Solresol is an auxlang that was created
in 1827 by the late François Sudre.
it’s the first known example of someone making a language to be used for international
communication, predating Esperanto by sixty years.
although it was made by Sudre, he probably wasn’t too proud of it, seeing’s how it
wasn’t published until after he died.
it was based on the seven notes of the western major scale, and it hypothetically can be
used as a spoken language, a written language (in a few ways), a purely musical language,
a sign language, a flag language, and basically any other type of communication you can think of.
its tonemes are:
these seven pitches are the western C major scale.
they’re important to music theory for reasons that are beyond the scope of this video.
what is within the scope of this video is the sheer number of ways these tonemes can
be represented.
this chart has a lot of them, but there’s a whole lot more, which mostly exist because
the C major scale itself can be represented in a lot of ways due to its aforementioned
importance to music theory.
the way it’s usually written is using solfège, a set of single syllables that correspond
to the major scale that you probably learned about from The Sound Of Music. of course,
the English version of solfège calls the note below do “ti” instead of “si”,
which makes it so that every syllable starts with a different sound, but this is based
on the French version, so you don’t get that advantage.
a language made out of pitch might sound vaguely similar to the idea of a tonal language, but
Solresol is fundamentally different from tonal languages in a few ways.
most importantly, Solresol’s tonemes are about absolute pitch rather than relative
pitch.
a high tone in a natural tonal language just needs to be high compared to the other tones
in a specific utterance. in Solresol, the toneme si, for example, needs to be at the
same pitch every time.
as mentioned before, Solresol can be written many, many ways, which would be incredibly
impressive if it weren’t for one problem: Solresol has more phonemes than just its tones.
tones can be pronounced in four ways: short unstressed, short stressed, long unstressed,
and long stressed.
these correspond to grammar stuff that I’ll get to in a bit, but the point is that most
of the many ways Solresol is written have no way of indicating stress or length, meaning
that there’s no way to distinguish between resimire, resimiré, resimiree, and resimiréé.
the grammar of Solresol is somewhat odd.
see, Solresol doesn’t have any affixes.
instead, the morphology uses stress and length.
a word is nounified by stressing the first toneme, adjectified by stressing the second
to last toneme, and pluralized by lengthening the final toneme. on top of that, stressing
the final toneme marks the feminine, which is another example of an old auxlang not seeing
the problem with assuming everyone’s male unless otherwise specified.
but wait, there’s more! you don’t stress the final toneme in the word; you stress the
final toneme in the PHRASE.
so domifado means “man”, domifadó means “woman”, domifado misol means “good
man”, and domifado misól means “good woman”! why this can’t just be done with
adjectives meaning “male” and “female” is a mystery.
the vocabulary is mathematically sound, but I wouldn’t really call it “musical”.
words are kinda organized into categories so words that start with the same toneme are
kinda related.
also, if you say a word backwards, you usually get its opposite, so “misol” means “good”
and “solmi” means “bad”.
that’s all well and good but like, when you’re listening to any amount of Solresol
text being sung or played on an instrument, it doesn’t sound very melodic.
that’s because individual words sound more like randomly selected notes than sections
of a melody.
like, “midosimi” starts and ends on the same note, but other than that it doesn’t
sound like it’s going anywhere.
this sort of thing might be unavoidable, but it would’ve been nice if Sudre made at least
some attempt to have his musical language sound more musical.
all in all, I’d say that Solresol doesn’t hold up very well.
the idea of a musical conlang is great, but the execution here is subpar. of course, the
par didn’t even exist at the time Solresol was made.
it was the first attempt at making an international language, and it really shows.
modern conlangers can deffo learn from Sudre’s mistakes.
that in mind, I’d say that I like Solresol more than I like Interlingua, but not as much
as I like aUI, making it the eighth best interlang reviewed so far.
thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next time, where I’ll be reviewing Loglan.