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 insists it isn't English,
Vötgil.
I'm a bit excited, because this episode is a first in a few ways.
it's the first episode that was requested,
(thank you, jcbk)
it's the first episode about a language that isn't notable enough to have a Wikipedia article,
and it's the first episode about an auxiliary language.
sure, we've covered international languages,
but Vötgil was specifically designed for
international communication as its primary goal.
that means I have an excuse
to scrutinize the HECK out of a language's internationality potential!
first things first. Vötgil is an auxlang
created by Jack Eisenmann in 2012,
based on an earlier language he made that was
straight up called "English" (but spelled with a q),
which, as the name might imply,
was just meant to be a simplified version of English.
the point of Vötgil is pretty much the same:
a version of English modified to be more useful
for international use.
since this is a newish language, its reference grammar is available
both as a PDF file and as a series of videos.
wait, what's this?
white text?
black background?
short, direct videos full of slightly wrong linguistic information?
have I been unknowingly copying this guy's style this entire time?
actually no that's dumb
we have a lot to cover, so let's get to the phonology.
so, like every other aspect of Vötgil,
its phonology is meant to be like English but simpler.
for reference, here's all the consonants that are in English:
and here's all the consonants that are in Vötgil.
as you can see, it's pretty much the same with only a few differences.
namely, the change in spelling, which we'll get to in a bit,
and the removal of the voiced postalveolar affricate,
the velar fricative, and the voiceless labiovelar approximant,
which, as far as a simpler version of English phonology goes, is a good start I guess?
I mean, if you're cutting sounds from English,
obviously the first one you wanna remove is the velar fricative,
because it's absent from the majority of English dialects,
and the second one to be removed is the voiceless w sound,
because it's absent from a lot of the most common English dialects.
after that, Vötgil decides to remove
the distinction between /ʒ/ and /dʒ/,
which is a pretty good idea, since it's not a very common distinction cross linguistically.
you know what else isn't very common cross linguistically?
dental fricatives.
frick, dental hecatives aren't even in all the dialects of English.
I mean, at least get rid of ONE of them,
since the distinction between /θ/ and /ð/ only matters for, like, what,
two pairs of words in English?
actually, looking through Vötgil's vocabulary,
it doesn't look like there's any meaningful distinction between them anywhere,
so there isn't any reason for them to be called different phonemes.
speaking of meaningless distinctions,
the velar and alveolar nasals seem to only have one minimal pair:
"Niq" and "Nin".
it kinda feels like Vötgil only makes these distinctions cause English makes them.
ideally, the consonants would look something like this.
see, that's an inventory limited only to sounds that are common,
and you can still speak English wecognizably wis only zese consonants.
let's look at the vowels.
I'm not going to directly compare this set of vowels to the one in English
because, frankly, English's vowels are a complete mess
and depend heavily on where you're from.
like, the official reference grammar of Vötgil
provides examples of English words these vowels appear in.
so if I made this chart based on my pronunciation of those words,
it would look something like this, and if I were to then
extrapolate from those pronunciations to,
say, Received Pronunciation, it would look like this.
again, a better version would look something like this.
actually, you could probably even get away
with something like this.
if you were to limit English to these three vowels
and the seventeen consonants from earlier,
it wud sawnd samsin layk zis.
ivan zaw it mayt sawnd cwanz,
it iz stil almost kamplili andastandabal
tu naytiv Inglic spikaz!
I'm not saying Eisenmann should've been all minimalist about Vötgil,
but he definitely could've simplified way more than he did.
this unnecessarily large inventory
is certainly to blame for Vötgil's weird orthography.
we've seen unconventional implementations
of the Latin alphabet before on this show,
but Vötgil does something a little more...
"innovative".
see, like most auxlangs, Vötgil tries to be
as clear with its spelling as possible, so it
uses one letter per phoneme. however, English
phonology, and therefore Vötgil phonology,
doesn't fit the Latin alphabet so neatly.
after assigning most letters to the sounds they typically
make in English (though the use of the letter u for the
sound /ʌ/ is a little weird), Vötgil still has some
letters left over, so it uses c for
the sound /ʃ/, x for the sound /θ/,
and q for the sound /ŋ/.
it looks a little weird, but at least it uses
the full Latin alphabet. unfortunately, there's still a few
sounds left over after all that, which really
should've been a sign to make the inventory smaller.
yet, the inventory stayed the size it is, and Eisenmann
decided to reuse a few of the symbols
for approximants for vowels. this goes against
the idea of one sound per letter,
but I guess Eisenmann thought no one would notice because
he still said "Every letter is pronounced... exactly 1 way,"
in the reference grammar! after that, there were still
two sounds left over. for the back open vowel,
Vötgil uses an ö,
since it's essentially a lower version of the sound /o/.
and for the voiced dental fricative, Vötgil uses
the letter ð, which also represents this sound in the IPA.
these two extra letters make it just slightly
more inconvenient for typing.
in addition to the Latin alphabet, Vötgil has its own
hand crafted writing system which might be
the worst writing system I've ever seen!
basically, each letter is given a number,
and then that number is written in base four,
where zero is white,
one is gray, two is dark gray,
and three is black.
there are several problems with this system.
first of all, it's not very computer friendly,
which wouldn't be a problem if it were pen and paper friendly,
which it isn't. however, the worst thing
about this system (you know, other than every single
aspect of the way it looks) is the reasoning
behind the order the letters go in.
first, there's the punctuation, shown on the bottom of this chart
for some reason, then there's the vowels,
sorted by "tone".
though, really, they're just circling through vowel space:
/u/
/o/
/ʌ/
/ɑ/
/æ/
/ɛ/
/ɪ/
/i/
this part is fine, though it's weird
that only two of the three "sometimes vowels"
went here. after the vowels come the consonants,
allegedly sorted by place of articulation
from back of the throat to
front of the mouth. so if we reverse their order,
we'll get them sorted neatly by place of articulation
the same way the IPA does it!
there's the bilabial sounds,
then the labiodental sounds,
then the alveolar sounds,
oh, but I guess we forgot about the dental sounds
so there they are. okay, then the rest
of the alveolar sounds, then the postalveolar sounds,
then the velar sounds,
then the- oh, wait, aren't there some approximants left?
shoot, forgot about those. oh, yeah, and we also forgot about
the nasal sounds. okay, I think we're good, so now
we're finally at the one glottal sound.
and we're done
except for the velar nasal forgot about that one too oops.
what the heck.
you could maybe make the argument that this kinda
sorts by manner of articulation, but
even then there's no excuse for
thinking that there's a consonant sound made further
in the back of the throat than the glottis.
I mean, it's not like Eisenmann doesn't know what type
of sound /h/ is, right?
I mean, as we can clearly see from this table he made,
it's obviously a glotal approximant!
we haven't even started talking about the vocabulary and grammar yet.
so, Vötgil has a six hundred word vocabulary.
each word is based on an English word, and
is exactly one syllable and three letters long.
this is an interesting idea. since
each word is the same length, you can write Vötgil
without spaces. can't say the same thing for speaking
Vötgil, though. the allowed syllable structures
are CVC and CCV. since all
words are in one of these two categories,
all consonants, except at the beginning and end of a sentence,
come in clusters of either two or three
in a row. this is normal for English, which allows
approximately too many consonants in a row,
but English is weird. a lot of
commonly spoken languages don't allow more than one consonant
in a row. and since Vötgil has so many
vowels, those languages' go to repair strategies
just won't work. the only good thing about
this vocabulary is that the three letter restriction and the
Anglocentrism sorta just cancel eachother out.
common words like "the" are too short
to be borrowed directly, so they have letters added to them,
while most words are too long,
so they're obscured. so the words aren't
international enough to be recognizable by
non English speakers, but they aren't English enough
to be recognized by English speakers.
so what you end up with is a set of
six hundred that'll be like kinda familiar
to you if you speak English. again though,
words common enough in English to be recognized by people who
only know, like, the basics are still obscured.
like the pronouns for instance.
I is too short, so it becomes "Nuy",
I mean, it's pronounced /nɑj/ though?
It's spelled "Nuy", but it's pronounced /nɑj/
for some reason? whatever.
"you" is too short, so it becomes "Ywn",
"she" is too short, so it becomes
it becomes, um,
oh.
huh. looks like there isn't
a Vötgil word for "she".
well, I guess that means the third person pronouns were
combined into one pronoun then.
makes sense, because "they" is just the right length
to be adapted directly, and its use
as an all purpose third person pronoun in English
is becoming more and more common as
oh, well, looks like the word "Ðey"
doesn't mean anything. I guess
the third person pronoun is something else? here, lemme see...
oh, well, guess there aren't
any third person pronouns in
Vötgil. doesn't say that anywhere
in the reference grammar, but I guess
the inclusion of this one feature
that literally every natural language has
is where Vötgil draws the line.
a suffix that makes a noun plural that's pronounced
differently depending on the voicedness of the noun's final sound?
"obviously!"
passive and gerund forms of verbs?
"would barely be a language without 'em!"
third person pronouns?
"um, wow, Anglophone much? uh,
not every language works like English, you know!"
anyway, the vocabulary is small.
it's not minimalist, but it tries to reduce
vocabulary whenever possible, typically using
the prefix Vöt, meaning opposite.
you know, like in Esperanto! yet, it still
has basic words for things that, given the small vocabulary,
probably don't need to be there. like, do there really
need to be separate words for "program" and "code"?
I think the least excusable word in the vocabulary, though,
is "Gil", which means "English".
one, it's the only proper noun in the
basic vocabulary. two, it doesn't sound
very much like "English". and three, Vötgil doesn't
even have a standard way to use proper nouns.
it's literally only there so Vötgil can be called
"the opposite of English", which,
looking at any aspect of it, is really,
really obviously not a good way to describe Vötgil.
so, after all that, the question is,
how good is Vötgil compared to Lojban and aUI?
well, I think it's clear that it's worse than Lojban.
Lojban's vocabulary can be hard to remember,
but at least its words flow easily
and sound like similar words in multiple languages.
Lojban's writing system is quirky, but
at least it's easy to type on an ASCII keyboard.
so what about aUI? this one's a little tougher.
my gut reaction to aUI was certainly
a lot more negative than my gut reaction to Vötgil.
but the thing is, when I learned more
about aUI, I started hating it less and less.
sure, aUI is hard to pronounce, but
the philosophy behind it makes it all the more elegant.
when I started learning more about Vötgil, on the other hand,
I started liking it less. oh,
it's based on English and nothing else.
oh, the writing system is made of dots.
oh, there's no third person pronouns
or names. oh, it's
optimized for communication in Minecraft.
all that in mind, Vötgil is the third best conlang reviewed so far.
*quietly* yeah, this is gonna be
*quietly* hard to edit.
one letter per morpheme!
"morpheme"? no, not
pfff
*to self* it's not "morpheme", silly
it's "phoneme"!
idiot.
okay,