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 same language world language,
Sambahsa.
so, here we are.
another episode, another international auxiliary language.
Sambahsa, also known as “Sambahsa-Mundialect”, was created by Dr. Oliver Simon, first published
in 2007. it’s a global international auxiliary language, putting it nominally in the same
category as your Esperantos and Novials and what have you, but Oliver’s approach to
auxlanging is significantly different from those other auxlangs’ creators.
Dave MacLeod describes Sambahsa as, quote, “a type of regularized Indo-European with
borrowings from other language families”.
unlike most other auxlangs, Sambahsa makes no attempt to be simple to learn.
while it is more regular than any major natural language, Oliver goes out of his way to make
Sambahsa feel natural, prioritizing this above ease of use.
my primary sources of information for this review were the seventh edition of The Grammar
of Sambahsa-Mundialect in English by Dr. Oliver Simon, as well as Henrique Matheus da Silva
Lima’s Sambahsa Mundialect Complete Grammar, both of which are available freely to download.
Sambahsa’s consonants are:
this is a lot of consonants.
we don’t have to look far to find out What’s the Most Commonly Spoken Language Whose Consonant
Inventory Is Incompatible with That of This Particular International Auxiliary Language?,
because it’s English! well, kinda.
those two rhotics, /ʁ/ and /r/, cannot both be approximated by English /ɹ/ while remaining
distinct, but Sambahsa’s rhotics are described not as two separate phonemes but as different
realizations of one single phoneme.
two realizations which are written differently, and you can’t predict which one to use through
phonological context alone.
still, the phrasing used when describing them suggests that merging these two phonemes is
probably fine.
the alveolar affricates /ts/ and /dz/ have no equivalent English phonemes, but English
speakers can pronounce them as functionally identical consonant clusters, one of which
appears at the end of the word “affricates”.
the palatal and velar fricatives /ç/ and /x/ are absent from a typical English consonant
chart, but [ç] commonly appears as the in “hue”, and [x] is, of course, the
in “loch”.
so you can theoretically make the argument that this inventory is compatible with English.
I’d disagree with that, but it is an argument that you can make.
regardless, any way you slice it, this inventory definitely is incompatible with Mandarin Chinese.
now, it might make sense to say that this is too many consonants to expect everyone
to be able to handle.
but to be fair, Sambahsa isn’t trying to be maximally easy to learn.
this language assumes that if you want to speak it, you’re willing to put in the effort
to learn how to say its words.
speaking of effort, Sambahsa’s vowels are:
that’s nine vowels, six of which having long and short varieties.
I think this is more vowels than necessary, though once again that’s pretty clearly
by design.
“more than necessary” is a common theme for Sambahsa.
in addition to these monophongs, Sambahsa also has some diphthongs, but they’re probably
not actually phonemic.
here’s all the ones I could find in the vocabulary.
like a lot of auxlangs, Sambahsa’s phonotactics are left undefined, which is something I’m
pretty tired of seeing.
that’s how you get words like “scii” /ˈst͡si.i/ in Esperanto, words that plenty
of people will have a hard time articulating.
and yet, after looking at Sambahsa, I can’t help but think I might have been too harsh
on auxlangs that do this.
after all, at least none of them have anything remotely as bad as “rjienrlwey”!
hey, Oliver!
hey.
Dr. Oliver!
listen.
w- what is this? it’s like.
okay, so I’m looking at this word here, right, and I just can’t help but wonder.
like, ignoring the etymology entirely, just looking at it purely as a sequence of phonological
segments intended to be pronounced as a single unit.
what the heck is this, Dr. Oliver?
hey everyone.
it’s me, jan Misali, the person who wrote this video and also is currently speaking.
I know what some of you are probably thinking, because I read the comments.
you’re thinking, “so what if you think some of these words are hard to pronounce?
that doesn’t mean that nobody can pronounce them!” and you’re right, I’m sure there
do exist people who are able to say rjienrlwey without any problems.
and that’s why I’m inviting you, the viewer, to take the #RjienrlweyChallenge! all you
need to do is record audio of yourself saying the word “rjienrlwey” out loud. and just
remember, this is a global international auxiliary language, so its target audience is “everyone”!
seriously I promise this video isn’t going to be 100% about aesthetics but there is in
fact a lot to say about Sambahsa’s orthography.
so, pros: Sambahsa uses the plain Latin alphabet with no diacritics.
it also makes an effort to somewhat preserve the spellings of its words from their sources,
to make them more recognizable.
cons: Sambahsa makes an effort to somewhat preserve the spellings of its words from their
sources.
this means silent letters, double letters, a complete lack of any way to reliably derive
spelling from pronunciation, and just. just so many context sensitive pronunciation rules,
like there’s just so many of them.
I’m putting them all on screen.
aw man that’s way too small, you’re not gonna be able to read that, here I’m zooming
in and scrolling by th- look, the point is there’s a lot of these rules.
and like, I get it?
I guess?
like, in a natural language all this stuff would be completely justified. and it’s
not like, ambiguous or anything.
like, no, you can’t derive spelling from pronunciation, but you can unambiguously derive
pronunciation from spelling.
so it has that going for it.
there’s this one very specific thing I’d like to point out here, but there’s a bit
of setup necessary first.
so, Sambahsa has a lot of consonants, right? and there’s this specific design problem
that comes out of trying to decide how to represent all of them.
so, let’s say you’re Oliver and you speak French, and you’re pretty comfortable using
the digraph for /ʃ/,
but of course it’s also pretty commonly used for /tʃ/, so it makes sense for that
too.
further back, /ç/ and /x/ both appear in German, and they’re both spelled with .
but, uh oh! you can’t use for all of those things! so what do you do?
well, in some languages, /x/ is written with , but that’s not an option because you
also have /h/, and it wouldn’t make sense for that to be anything other than .
maybe you could get away with using for /x/, like in Spanish, but you also happen
to have /ʒ/, and as a French speaker, you find that using for /ʒ/ makes more sense.
and of course is off the table, because in the interest of preserving spellings you
gotta use it for /ks/.
well, beans.
you guess you gotta write /x/ using then, which isn’t super common but at least it’s
somewhat intuitive.
well, that’s one down, you suppose.
and up to this point, I completely understand your line of reasoning.
what I would do from here is use for /ʃ/,
and then use or something for /tʃ/.
obviously it’s not ideal, but with this many consonants to work with you gotta make
compromises.
what you do instead, and by you I still mean Dr. Oliver Simon, is that you decide to write
/ʃ/ with , like in German,
which is like.
sure, it’s fine.
it works.
and then you use for /tʃ/.
on its own, also fine.
this is in fact the most sensible way to write this phoneme. this is where the weird thing
happens.
you go right ahead and use for /ç/.
there are a lot of things I could have singled out about Sambahsa’s orthography, but this,
the decision to use for the sound /ç/, is the one aspect where I do not in any way
understand why it is what it is.
like, it doesn’t make sense to have /ç/ as a phoneme in this language to begin with,
but the way Sambahsa uses /ç/ is baffling to me.
because, remember, it’s specifically aiming to preserve spellings, so you get stuff like
this,
which is pretty clearly from the English word “shortstop”, and it in fact means “shortstop”,
but then, because preserving spelling was the priority, it’s actually “hyortstop”!
the icing on the cake for this, the thing that’s too good to be true, is the word
“shibboleth”,
which, if you’re unfamiliar, means “thing that you say to prove that you are capable
of pronouncing the sound [ʃ]”.
so remember when I quoted that guy at the beginning of this video saying that Sambahsa
is a type of regularized Indo-European?
well, I guess now I have to explain what that means.
Sambahsa is primarily based on Proto-Indo-European, the reconstructed ancestor of the Indo-European
languages.
the Indo-European language family is the most significant language family in the world,
by any metric that measures significance with the things that Indo-European languages have
the most of.
like “speakers”!
basing an auxlang on Proto-Indo-European kinda makes sense similarly to how it kinda makes
sense to base an auxlang on Latin.
Latin is the ancestor of the Romance languages, which themselves are very commonly spoken,
and Latin-derived vocabulary can be found in plenty of languages outside of the Romance
family.
Proto-Indo-European, of course, is also the ancestor of the Romance languages, as well
as the Germanic languages and the Indo-Aryan languages and the Slavic languages and the
Iranian languages et cetera et cetera.
so, in theory, there’s nothing wrong with an auxlang based on Proto-Indo-European.
however, I think you’ve gotten a pretty good feel for Sambahsa’s design philosophy
by now, right?
well, buckle up!
here’s a declension table.
these suffixes are added to nouns and adjectives depending on case, number, and gender, but
only if you want to, and only if it sounds good.
the information contained in these “euphonic vocalization” suffixes is completely redundant,
and is already indicated with other things.
these are only here if you just really want to add a suffix to a noun or an adjective
declined for case, number, and gender.
oh, and yes, this auxlang does indeed have grammatical gender.
fortunately, its noun classes aren’t quite as arbitrary as those found in most Indo-European
languages with grammatical gender, you just use whatever grammatical gender corresponds
to whatever you’re talking about’s gender gender.
other than these completely optional suffixes, noun morphology is relatively simple.
the only thing that’s required to be marked on nouns directly is number, where the root
form of the noun is the singular and the plural is formed with one of five suffixes or no
suffix, depending on what the noun ends with and if it’s animate.
I assume that “phonetically incompatible” is supposed to mean that you use those suffixes
when the noun’s root form ends with a sibilant, but that’s not actually explicitly spelled
out, another reason why it’s bad to leave phonotactics undefined.
while case and gender are not required to be marked on nouns, they are marked on pronouns.
this isn’t all of them, just the ones that could fit on a chart like this.
it really isn’t as bad as it looks.
if you look closely enough you can see the repeating patterns here.
the third person pronouns also function as definite articles.
they usually show up as definite articles more often than as pronouns because of the
extensive verb system, which-
oh, I almost completely skipped the indefinite article! unlike the definite articles which
come in a wide variety of flavors, the indefinite article is pretty much always “un”, but
you can also add those optional euphonic vocalization suffixes to your heart’s content, just in
case you missed them.
anyway, verbs- uh,
you know what, let’s talk about adjectives first! adjectives are nice.
I like adjectives.
they go before nouns or prepositional phrases.
once again, those handy dandy euphonic vocalization suffixes are at your disposal, but the only
morphology you have to worry about is the comparative and superlative suffixes.
this is functionally pretty familiar for English speakers, but honestly at this point Englishiness
feels like a breath of fresh air.
you can also turn any adjective into an adverb super simply by adding the -ye suffix, written
with a hyphen. once again, super basic stuff.
in contrast with this very simple system, verbs-
I,
in contrast with this very simple system, prepositions are a bit more complicated.
in terms of morphology, most are nice and straightforward, like “pro”, meaning “for”,
but then the word for “of” has different forms depending on number and gender, like
in French.
as far as I can tell, no other prepositions work like this.
also, nouns within prepositional phrases are put in the accusative case.
I guess this isn’t that complicated.
especially not when compared to-
when compared to-
okay, fine, I’ve put it off long enough.
it’s time to talk about verbs.
what you’re looking at here is a table of the various suffixes used for verb conjugation
in Sambahsa.
I know this looks like it’s a lot of stuff to keep track of, but don’t worry, it’s
actually much, much more complicated than it looks.
but first, we need to talk about the Indo-European ablaut.
in Indo-European languages, ablaut is a type of vowel gradation that happens sometimes,
like in English “sing, sang sung”. this has its origins in the Proto-Indo-European
language, where...
in Sambahsa, a somewhat more regular version of ablaut is used as part of the verb conjugation
system.
it works slightly differently for different types of verbs, but all verbs can be grouped
into one of eight categories, which can be identified entirely based on spelling. of
course, since spelling cannot be derived from pronunciation...
the first category of verbs is the verbs with a “nasal infix”, meaning that they have
some nasal consonant next to an unstressed in their stem. in the present tense, the
is removed, and in the past tense, the whole nasal infix is removed.
unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple, because...
quote, “You may question: but why Sambahsa has this characteristic?
Sambahsa behaves like a natural language, if you analyze it
well, it's more pleasant to speak in this way,
people naturally would want to drop this unstressed “e”.
Without this rule, the language could be a bit easier, but it wouldn't be
much comfortable to speak.
Do you doubt me?
Check whether the incorrect conjugation... is pleasant to pronounce...
It becomes a mess, if you look it well you'll notice that that pronunciation is not very
natural or human!”
when the nasal infix is removed, any adjacent or is removed with it.
additionally, the “Von Wahl rules”, which we’ll get into later, apply for verbs with...
“Present tense: pregno, pregens, pregent, pregnems, pregent, pregnent”
the second category of verbs is called “unstressed ‘e’”, which I have to assume includes
verbs that end with silent e as well, based on the examples provided.
the standard suffixes generally apply here, but in order to make sure that the stress
patterns are...
“There is a sub-category of verbs endings with « ie ». Those verbs often correspond
to English nouns ending in “-ication”.”
now, the third category of verbs, verbs ending with before at least one consonant, is
where the real ablaut stuff starts happening.
so, in the past tense, this is replaced with , meaning that the past tense doesn’t
need to be marked at all for these verbs.
so, “sprehgo” is “I speak”, but “io sprohg” is “I spoke”. and as you can
see, this is pretty similar to how “strong verbs” in Germanic languages...
“However, because of the difficult pronunciation of the final « -kw », forms with conjugational
endings are preferred :”
the fourth category of verbs have or as their inner vowels, and in the past
tense these have their removed, replacing and with and . this is what’s
called the “zero-grade” in Proto-Indo-European, and...
“- sneigv : to snow Present : sneigvt : Since “v” is not directly
after “ei”, it does not turn to “f””
the fifth category is verbs with as their inner vowel, which turns into in the
past tense.
just a completely normal thing, replacing /a/ with /je/. but then remember, it’s Sambahsa,
so of course there’s a bunch of stuff that makes this more complicated...
replacing the with if the original was part of the digraph means that
now the is part of the digraph , which is pronounced like /øː/, so that means the
/a/ to /je/ thing is sometimes actually /ao/ to /jøː/. and that’s the system working
as intended.
completely regular! ugh, and don’t even get me started on...
okay, we’re almost done, the sixth category of verbs is verbs ending in a few specific
consonants, and this is the main case where the “Von Wahl rules” apply.
so super broadly, these rules turn certain consonants into specific other consonants
in specific contexts.
oops that was way too broad let me try again...
“6th category of verbs : Von Wahl rules The final consonants of these verbs undergo
modifications for the past tense and the past participle in “t”.
These are as follows:”
the seventh category of verbs is verbs ending with stressed vowels, and these are mostly
regular, just sometimes adding an epenthetic consonant for the suffixes that start with
vowels...
“Moreover, verbs ending with “v” undergo the following modifications for their past
participle in “t”.
If “v” comes after “a” or a consonant, “v” turns to “w”.
Examples: solv = solwt; lav = lawt Otherwise, “v” disappears.
Example: mov = mot Those rules may look difficult at first sight,
but they only encompass within a regular framework irregularities often seen in English.
Decide : decision; permit : permission; convert : conversion; solve : solution; move : motion”
and then finally the eighth category is everything else, and these just have the normal suffixes.
really, this should’ve been category one.
and really it’s exactly as simple as it sounds.
despite most of what I’ve said in the past several minutes, Sambahsa isn’t like, completely
horrible.
I’m sure a younger version of myself would just say “it’s bad” and leave it at
that, but Sambahsa really has some good ideas, which are mostly found in its vocabulary.
one of the biggest problems with international languages is Eurocentrism, where a proposed
global language is just optimized for Europe, under the assumption that if something woks
for Europe it’ll be fine everywhere else.
Sambahsa avoids this by deriving its vocabulary from the most diverse set of source languages
I’ve seen in a language covered on this show, shown here on this pie chart, pun intended.
the distribution is pretty iffy, and some major language families are lumped into that
“other” category, but it’s hard to argue with Sambahsa’s results.
from what I can tell, individual words in Sambahsa were selected by asking “what’s
the most common origin for a word with this meaning?”, adjusted for how many people
speak each language, as a way of getting at what the most recognizable word for any individual
concept is.
and, honestly, I think this is a pretty good way of generating vocabulary.
checking various words in different languages against Sambahsa’s vocabulary, Sambahsa
generally succeeds in finding some sort of common ground.
in this semi-random set of words, you can see that every word I picked is similar enough
to be recognizable to speakers of at least one of the top ten most common languages,
with more common languages in general matching more words, with at least one pretty major
exception.
Mandarin Chinese has by far the most native speakers of any language.
it’s extremely important.
despite this, words from the Chinese languages make up a disproportionately small portion
of Sambahsa vocabulary.
this is, I think, somewhat understandable.
while the Chinese languages have a very large number of speakers, Sinitic words are measurably
less internationally recognizable than words from other massive language families.
individual examples of Sinitic words that are well known outside of East Asia are usually
words for concepts that originated in China, like the “tea” example shown on this chart.
the problem isn’t really the amount of Sinitic vocabulary.
the problem is the quality of the Sinitic vocabulary.
welcome back, rjienrlwey!
this word has cognates in various Chinese languages, as well as Japanese, Korean, and
Vietnamese.
there is a significant amount of variation, but you can still kinda tell that they are
related.
so Sambahsa makes a compromise.
it doesn’t go to the Old Chinese common ancestor of these words, like how vocabulary
from other sources works, it just jams everything together and calls it a day.
the only other real problem I have with the Sambahsa lexicon is how deriving new words
from existing roots just kinda isn’t a thing.
like, even something as simple as turning a noun into an adjective works differently
depending on the etymology of the given word, which means you either have to know every
word’s etymology or more likely that you just have to learn every noun-derived adjective
separately.
despite a few oddities, I in general think Sambahsa’s vocabulary is pretty good, easily
its strongest aspect.
oh, and for what it’s worth, Sambahsa passes the “what do you call Germany” test, but
it fails the follow-up “what do you call Japan” test.
the following text was written by Dr. Oliver Simon, as part of a description of the Sambahsa
translation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.
Ciois, ego regreto od ia major (taiper maschourst) planbahsas
sont pior gwaur-ye centret ep romanc bahsas (samt un wolga om germanic influences).
Ya, Westeuropay bahsas sont extreme-ye importanta tienxia,
bet ne sont ia wahid surces pro international launwerds
(yani werds trohven in uno mier numer om bahsas, esdi ta bayghe different linguistic familias).
Itak ho chust un novatoro proschgumt.
all in all, Sambahsa is fascinating.
by most objective metrics I could use to judge an IAL, Sambahsa is a failure.
and yet, there are some things it does remarkably well.
if it were a fictional language, Sambahsa would be one of my favorites.
but, Sambahsa is not a fictional language.
there’s a quote near the beginning of Oliver’s reference grammar attributed to Steve Rice,
who says, “all languages (less frills) and especially all auxlangs are about equal in
difficulty; they just load the difficulty differently.
Sambahsa drops a piano on you when you ring the doorbell, but after that it's probably
a gracious host.”
while maybe it is the case that a simpler language comes with difficulties when trying
to express yourself with it, I think I’d still rather not have a piano dropped on me.
thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next time, where I’ll be reviewing Sindarin.
pakala la, sina awen lon nasin sina, li weka e jaki
o sona e ni: ike li pini ala
ike la, o kute e ni: