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 verbless artlang, Kēlen.
when I first heard the concept of Kēlen, I was immediately sceptical. no verbs? that
can’t be right. how would that even work? surely, what Kēlen does is relabel its verbs
in a way that disguises their function, or maybe there’s just a large set of things
that you can’t say in Kēlen. right?
Kēlen is a fictional language created by Sylvia Sotomayor, who has been working on
it since 1980. at the time of writing, the most recent update to it was made in June
2019. in universe, it’s a non-human language, spoken by elves called the Kēleñi. there
is definitely some external lore associated with Kēlen, but the language largely exists
as a standalone work.
Kēlen’s consonants are:
/m n ɲ ŋ/ /p t s c k/
/ɸ θ ʃ ç x/ /l ʎ/
/r/
okay, I really like this inventory. it’s not especially unique or anything, but it’s
well balanced in a way where everything definitely fits together nicely. big fan of the palatal
series and that labial fricative.
now you might be wondering about the placement of /s/ there in the stop row, which is definitely
not a stop consonant. Sylvia explains that in universe it was historically an affricate,
[ts], that ended up shifting into a fricative for most speakers. it makes sense to still
consider it a stop due to the way it behaves phonotactically.
stops and fricatives are phonemically voiceless, but they are sometimes voiced, specifically
when one comes between two phonemically voiced sounds. the difference between how they behave
is that some speakers pronounce fricatives as voiced in all contexts, which doesn’t
apply to /s/.
this is, I think, enough to justify the apparent mislabeling. that and the fact that it makes
the chart narrower.
most of the resonants here also have geminated forms listed, specifically all the nasals
and all the liquids except the palatal lateral.
I don’t think it’s strictly necessary to analyze these as separate phonemes, for
reasons I will explain in a bit.
Kēlen’s vowels are:
/i u/ /iː uː/
/e o/ /eː oː/
/a/ /aː/
it’s just the five vowel system plus length, pretty basic. there also exists a marginally
phonemic close central vowel, only appearing in some dialects, which lets me rearrange
this whole dang chart.
there’s also a few diphthongs, which are:
/je/ /jeː/
/aj aw/ /aːj aːw/
Sylvia doesn’t explicitly define Kēlen’s syllable structure on her website any further
than “consonant-vowel-consonant”. however, I was able to get a feel for what stuff is
allowed just by looking at the canon wordlist, which leads to the main reason I don’t think
it makes sense to call the double resonants separate phonemes: there are plenty of examples
in the wordlist of doubled versions of other consonants.
so I think the more sensible analysis is to say that the doubled consonants are just a
consonant appearing in the coda of one syllable, then appearing again in the onset of the next
syllable, especially since there are no examples of any double consonant appearing anywhere
other than between two vowels.
though I guess to get a full understanding of the phonotactics, I’d have to check every
single possible pair of consonants to see if they’re attested in the wordlist, and
that sounds like a lot of work, I don’t really want to do that. I mean, I’d have
to check like, what, eight nif pairs of phonemes? yeah, I’m not doing that.
...
so here’s a table showing which pairs of consonants exist in words in the canon dictionary.
I guess I should say that just because there aren’t any attested words that have a specific
cluster doesn’t necessarily mean that that cluster isn’t allowed. it’s instead more
useful to look at the big picture.
even though only seven consonants appear word finally, all but one appear syllable finally,
the exception being the palatal lateral. granted, that’s only if you consider the geminate
consonants to be one consonant twice in a row rather than phonemes in their own right.
let’s remove all the rows for consonants where the only time they appear in the coda
is when they’re geminated.
looking at it like this, you can see that some types of consonant clusters completely
don’t exist: there are no sequences of a stop followed by a fricative, or two different
fricatives in a row. the only stop-stop sequences that exist are ones where the first stop is
/s/, which is definitely making me kinda regret going along with the analysis that /s/ is
a stop. oh well.
I think Kēlen’s phonology is pretty good, even though it obviously wasn’t the main
focus. it definitely serves the language well, and has a nice aesthetic.
before I get into Kēlen’s orthographies, I’m gonna start with the Romanization.
really the only thing I don’t like here is the use of for /ɸ/. it does work for
the common voiced allophone [β], but even then would be better for it than .
everything else makes sense.
I do, however, have a super nitpicky complaint about the way it’s presented. on her website,
Sylvia, for some reason, uses slashes to mark the Romanization? and she does the same thing
when giving examples from other languages. this caused seconds of confusion where I assumed
based on convention that this was supposed to be phonemic transcription. I assume this
is a holdover from some web 1.0 restriction, but like, come on, slashes are for phonemic
transcription, and orthography should use angle brackets.
anyway, Kēlen has two orthographies. the main one is an alphabet that looks like this.
the line across the top of everything makes it look a whole lot like Devanagari, but functionally
it’s just an alphabet. its design is somewhat featural. for example, fricatives are written
with letters that look like their corresponding stops but with an extra line added to the
right, and there’s a few place-of-articulation diacritics used consistently for nasals and
liquids.
you might have noticed that on this chart that there’s apparently a letter for some
sort of palatal trill. that is, of course, the letter for /r/ with the same palatal diacritic
used for writing the two palatal resonants. since there isn’t an actual palatal trill
phoneme, it’s used for the cluster /rç/.
the place-of-articulation diacritics are also used for writing diphthongs, which is pretty
neat.
this alphabet is solid, but it’s easily the less interesting of Kēlen’s two writing
systems.
Kēlen’s other orthography is its Ceremonial Interlace Alphabet, which as the name implies
is an alphabet used for ceremonial purposes with an interlace aesthetic.
before going over how it works, I’d just like to say how beautiful this is! I really
like interlace as a decorative style, and using it for a writing system is such a cool
idea! everything ends up looking like ribbons knotted together in these really cool patterns.
now, since this is meant to be used more decoratively than for actual writing, it can be kinda hard
to tell what’s actually going on when looking at stuff written in the Ceremonial Interlace
Alphabet, which is completely by design. I mean, this doesn’t even look like writing!
this design actually says taxōnīkōn, which means “conlanger”.
since the Ceremonial Interlace Alphabet is completely decorative and not meant to be
used for writing lengthy texts, long vowels are written the same as short vowels. now,
if you look closely at this design, you’ll see that most of it is one long continuous
band, and the way that band is knotted is what spells out the letters for T-A-X-O-N-I-K-O-N,
and then just for good measure it loops back on itself.
by the way, when I was making this video’s thumbnail, I made the bands thinner to make
it easier to appreciate the braided structure. this is supposed to say “Kēlen”.
I guess I don’t have that much to say about it, but dang I think this might be my new
favorite writing system, it just looks so good!
from October 2009 to December 2011, Sylvia Sotomayor did a thing on her blog called “Kēlen
Word of the Day”, where every day she highlighted a specific Kēlen word. this way of presenting
vocabulary one word at a time in a context that’s separate from the actual documentation
gives a little bit more structure than just reading through the dictionary, partially
sorted by category and partially walking through translations of different texts.
there were a lot of highlights that I took screenshots of as I read through it, and I
don’t really have that much to say about any of them individually other than “hey
this is neat” so right now I’m just padding out the script so that they’re not going
by too fast for you to see them.
as a whole, Kēlen vocabulary definitely works to show who the Kēleñi are and what their
culture is like, which is of course by necessity, as there isn’t a full work of fiction to
go with it. even though the Kēleñi aren’t human, they aren’t really alien. their culture
definitely seems like it would fit in just fine on Earth.
the only real indication in the vocabulary that this isn’t supposed to be a human language
are the words that refer to things that don’t exist, but even then they’re usually directly
compared to something familiar. not that I’m complaining, of course. the worldbuilding
on display in Kēlen’s vocabulary is very impressive.
anyway, pronouns.
the four-way grammatical number distinction made with the pronouns doesn’t actually
appear anywhere else; only personal pronouns have separate dual and paucal forms. also,
the reduced forms there are used as nonspecific abbreviations of the other pronouns regardless
of number, and they can also be used as relative pronouns.
oh also, Kēlen’s numbering system uses octal, base eight. fun!
we now arrive at the main event, the grammar. the whole idea of Kēlen is that it doesn’t
have verbs. how does that even work? well, one thing at a time.
nouns in Kēlen are given prefixes that mark animacy. this is not inherent to a given noun,
and in fact weather something counts as animate or inanimate can vary from speaker to speaker.
ranging from only referring to one’s own kin as animate to referring to literally everything
as animate.
the “possessed” prefixes are used for when something is a part of somebody, usually
referring to body parts, but it’s sometimes used for other things.
as briefly mentioned before, there’s also grammatical number. the plural is marked with
the -i suffix, or -ien for animate nouns.
okay, that’s enough about that. now let’s talk about how Kēlen works without verbs.
so, what Kēlen has instead of verbs is a set of four words called “relationals”,
which are really just verbs. so, exactly as I suspected, Kēlen just relabels its verbs
as something else.
that’s not really fair though. Kēlen’s relationals work like verbs functionally,
but they don’t carry any semantic meaning. and like, the fact that there’s only four
of them still shouldn’t just be written off. there definitely is truth to the claim
that Kēlen is a verbless language.
the first relational is la, the “relational of existence”. it roughly corresponds to
the verb “to be”. it’s used for saying that something exists or that two things are
the same.
you know, general copula stuff. there’s also a past tense te and a negative wa, which
count as being the same relational I guess.
the second relational is ñi, the “relational of change”. it’s like la, but it’s used
for change of state instead of static state.
“causing something to become something else” is a really general concept that encompasses
a lot of things that you’d normally use separate verbs for. the way it works actually
reminds me a lot of how transitive verbs work in Toki Pona, my favorite conlang.
rather than having a designated verb for something like “melt”, you instead use an adjective
and put some particles around it to talk about a change of state; instead of saying that
heat melts ice, you say that it causes ice to become melted. it’s a really useful concept
that you can get a lot of mileage out of.
the relational ñi can also be inflected for agent, replacing a pronoun that normally would
be necessary.
the third relational is se, the “transactional relational”. it roughly corresponds to the
verb “to give”. it’s used for talking about giving and taking things. it’s also
used for talking about talking, in the sense that speaking is “giving words”, and it’s
also used for introducing a topic.
just like how ñi can be inflected for agent, se can be inflected for “source” and “beneficiary”.
the resulting table is definitely a lot to take in, but you can still tell that it’s
not just completely arbitrarily assigning things. a word like sexelte fits in with the
other inflections of se with the same source and with the same beneficiary.
the final relational is pa, which doesn’t have a fun descriptive name. it roughly corresponds
to the verb “to have”. it’s actually an extension of something that can be used
with la. as you can probably guess, it’s used for saying that something has something,
both for actual possession and for when something has an abstract property.
there’s really not that much to this one, but it is still just as versatile as the others.
looking at this system as a whole, with these four relationals, I can’t help but think
that this could’ve worked with fewer than four. I really don’t think they’re all
strictly necessary. the relational of change could’ve been merged into the relational
of existence with creative use of word order.
I mean, earlier I compared the relational of change to how transitive verbs in Toki
Pona work, and in Toki Pona, the stuff handled by Kēlen’s relationals of existence and
change are both covered by the same grammatical particle.
I also think the transactional relational and the one without a nickname could be merged
into one thing by way of the relational of change. I mean, in a sense, giving someone
something is the same as causing them to have it, right?
that said, I don’t think having the bare minimum number of these relationals was what
Sylvia had in mind. I mean, Kēlen isn’t really an engineered language, it it. it definitely
has elements of an engelang, but at heart it’s a fictional language and an art language.
in a sense, Kēlen actually has a lot in common with Drsk. they’re both fictional languages
that have elements that fit more with the design philosophy of an engineered language.
it’s just that Kēlen does a much, much better job at it.
the following text is an excerpt from Aesop’s The North Wind and the Sun, translated into
Kēlen by Sylvia Sotomayor.
se mūrāna masīrien; se malō; iēlte teteñ anþēŋŋeni ien la ma pa antāken
anānexa makēñ; il aþ ñi marāona nīkamma jalūra jacālle
rājanō; teteñ anñēīki ien la ma pa antāken anānexa
ma ñamma jalūra rū marāona pēxa cēja; il ñamma anūri nā ā mūrāna masīrien
il ñamma jalūra rā sāen āñ nō ā marāona;
all in all, I like Kēlen a lot. from the aversions of linguistic universals to the
piecemeal worldbuilding to this divination thing to my favorite writing system for any
conlang, I could feel the passion and dedication that Sylvia Sotomayor put into it. I’m not
sure if it’s my favorite fictional language, but it’s definitely in my top three. Kēlen
is a wonderful conlang that I’m glad I had the chance to take an in depth look at.
thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next time, where I’ll be reviewing Lingwa de
Planeta.
o tawa waso! o pali e ale!
sina ken, tawa mi! mi ken kute e
kalama sina tan insa pilin mi
hey everyone. in case you didn’t notice, I changed the name of this channel to “jan
Misali”. if you’re wondering why, I made a short video announcing the change. Conlang
Critic isn’t going anywhere. that said, I do actually have one big video planned to
go between this video and the upcoming Lingwa de Planeta episode. I’m unreasonably excited
about this one. oh, I should do a big announcement! yeah, that’ll be cool.