<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="679">11:19</a> ASL does this! It’s word order is Time-Topic-Comment-Question, like “TOMMOROW STORE YOU GO WHEN?” Where STORE is the topic. Question auxiliaries can be placed in the middle of a sentence for rhetorical questions, like in a sentence “you’re going to the store for cheese?” “STORE YOU GO WHY? CHEESE WANT?”

"...adult humans, and lightning." "Haha, lol! That is delightful!" *compleately serious* "Yes. Yes, it is."

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="457">7:37</a> German here: Another feature in German is that we take "gehen" very literally. You don't "go" by car, you "drive". So the correct sentence would be: "Ich fahre morgen mit dem Auto in die Stadt." :)

Artifexian: [sæŋwɪt͡ʃ] jan miseli: [sæŋmæn] Explanation. Now.

As a German speaker I have to point out that we wouldn't say "Ich GEHE mit dem Auto in die Stadt" but "Ich FAHRE mit dem Auto in die Stadt". "fahren" is German for "drive". We tend to use that for denoting "traveling by vehicle" instead of using the general "go" like in English.

I thought the title was "free world order in oa" like a transcription of some political literature

Love it when my favorite KZfaqrs have a crossover episode!

First time I heard about those "BAGS adjectives" in French ...

I just realized my mother tongue is a free association language!

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="735">12:15</a> jan Misali: Why the heck would people start saying /ji/?

While I understand very little of what you say, it's still very entertaining

Did Bib introduce himself with Edun? Unfortunately I don't speak it!

oa really felt like it was turning into a kitchen sink conlang the longer this video went on.

I only noticed that my native language, Polish, implies definitiveness by where the noun is in the clause when you said that Russian does this. Thank you for enlightening me once again! In Polish, definite nouns come before the verb while indefinite (newly introduced) nouns come after the verb. This is often obscured because since Polish agrees verbs with the subject, definite subjects are usually missed out and can be inferred. For example, when talking about your dog, you would say "lubi jeść kości" [lit. "likes (3rd person singular) to eat bones"] because the listener knows that you are talking about your dog. However, the definitiveness implication is evident in some cases, for example: The default word order is SVO so without any context you would say "Jan wszedł do pokoju" ["John went into room (locative)"] However, if you are currently talking about the room, like describing it, you would say "Do pokoju wszedł Jan" ["Into the room (locative) went John"], showing that John is a newly introduced noun. It would be OK but slightly confusing to put it the other way round because it would seem like going off topic. And when John is the topic of the conversation (which happens more often), it is the room that needs to be introduced so is put at the end, even if it were the subject of the verb: "Jana zaskoczył pokój" [lit. "John (accusative) surprised room (nominative)", fully translated: "A room surprised John" or "John was surprised by a room"]. If "pokój" [room] came before the verb, it would be translated as definitive: "The room surprised John".

Why did you not say "links in the duu bee doo"?... Kinda sad tho...

I had no idea the Japanese word for "goat" is 山羊. That is hilarious!

I know this has already been addressed, but: sangwidge

ok but what tempted you to include the bilabial thrill, was it the devil himself?

At the beginning when you said 'Bib'to refer to Biblaridion I thought you said 'babe' I'm crying

The only conlang I've made that got far enough for me to make grammar was a topic prominent language and it was messy as hell

Thanks Artifexian and also Biblaridion for this massively interesting video, I am developing a language family of Bantu conlangs and you two gave me a great idea on how to make them slightly different from one another. Many thanks to you both for the inspiration!

I seriously doubt I've ever been this early for a non-premiere video.

I understand that free word order is very fascinating for English speakers, and when I learnt Latin I liked it, but now I like personally grammatical word order because extra markers are more inefficient. It's more useful to mark topic and focus if necessary.

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="493">8:13</a> In the literal translation it says "morning" instead of "tomorrow".

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="185">3:05</a> Is this what the scandinavian languages did? En katt ("A cat"), Ett hus ("A house") Katten ("The cat"), Huset ("The house") Notice how the indefinite basically just moves to the end in the definite case.

About the russian example of word order conveying definiteness. While it's true (and wow, i never thought of it as a russian native speaker, that's pretty cool!) it is ALSO about the topic, especially in the first sentence. Like, yes, it's THE boy, but if this is a sentence from a novel, for example, it's also probably the boy whom the last several sentences were about, hence - the topic. And just like in basque, if you have a conversation about bones in russian, you can actually say "Кости едят собаки" ("Bones eat dogs") - as for the bones, dogs eat them. Those two things probably overlap a lot though, since the topic usually is the definite information, and other nouns could very well be the newly introduced concepts - just like in that example.

"Ich gehe morgen mit dem Auto in die Stadt" sounds weird in German. They prefer to say "Ich fahre morgen mit dem Auto in die Stadt" which means "Tomorrow, I drive by car to the city". The English verb "to go" can mean many things but the German verb "gehen" strictly means to walk. If you want an equivalent you should try "sich begeben" which means "to move". The sentence would then be: "Ich begebe mich morgen mit dem Auto in die Stadt". But that's very formal!

Love the fact that my first mother tongue is mentioned that often and obviously apply for a lot of features mentioned here - German.

This was very useful as I've been having trouble with the world order of my conlang titaneyan

Each of there little things deserves its own video

(<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="220">3:40</a>) Swedish (and other Scandinavian languages) have the definite article as a suffix, being -n or -t (with a vowel inserted when complicated consonant clusters would occur). So "Hoa ngo" could evolve into "Hoang" as a definite inflection?

Brilliant!!

Tickled to see a few of my recent favorite languages on display as examples. 'Specially Lakhota, since it doesn't get enough attention in my opinion. Been one of my faves recently. Quick note, as an aside about that bit about Focus is that Focus can also kind of directly interface with case grammar and be a kind of underspecified case of its own. That might sound confusing, but I'll show you what I mean: In Tagalog, NP arguments of a verb are marked with either "ang" or "ng" (pronounce like /naŋ/), which are called the "direct" and "indirect" respectively. By themselves they don't tell you what the role of their NPs are in a sentence, though; they need to get that information from the verb itself. So for the verb root "kain" (eat), you can put into the Actor-Focus (read also, Subject-Focus) or the Object-Focus form, and that form tells you what the Direct (the one with "ang") is marking, with the Indirect filling the other one. Kumain ang kuneho ng cake. = The rabbit(Focus) ate cake. Kinain ng kuneho ang cake. = The rabbit ate cake(Focus). These are all in the same order, but there is another order you can put these into where the Direct gets fronted and followed by a particle "ay". Ang kuneho ay kumain ng cake. Ang cake ay kinain ng kuneho. Now, the exact use of these I don't fully understand yet, and a native Tagalog speaker can correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it is used kind of for emphasis and also to be more or less specific about what you're talking about. Kumain ako (I ate) doesn't need a direct object to be a complete sentence but it could have one. Kinain ko (I ate...) on the other hand usually DOES need a direct object to be a complete sentence. Again, native Tagalog speakers, correct me if I got anything wrong here, and I know there's a whole lot more to it than that.. I think your language is pretty cool and wanna learn more. May this serve as good inspiration to the conlangers out there. :)

My language can be pre or post-positional with adjectives and sov and osv are both allowed You can actually drop the object, verb and subject markers if you are always speaking in that order and not changing He(sub marker) she(obj marker) loves(ver marker) and she(obj marker) he(sub marker) loves(ver marker) are both accepted

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="185">3:05</a> Isn’t this exactly what Russian does? They lack words for “a” and “the”, so they either attach suffixes to indicate the article or use “one” and “this” for definite articles, I guess depending on the dialect.

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="140">2:20</a> this also occurs in Hebrew: pa'am = time achat = one pa'am achat = once shta'im = two pil'pel = pepper shta'im pil'pelim = two peppers

Father you back

Although this is far outside your heavily scientific style, I would quite enjoy seeing you design a magic system.

VSO / VOS depending on topic proninence is my go-to.

I don't know why, but when you speak irish it sounds to my ear like you're speaking american accented english, except I'm not listening close enough to understand the words. this was very fascinating and fun to realize what a mess english really is as you construct something new that's actually more structured than it is!

/ʙ , ʙ̥/ are easy to pronounce. my only problem with it is that speakers may go overkill with it, essentially entertaining themselves rather than communicating

Great video.

My adjective is inside my noun... I'm figuring it out as I go along. I'm now looking for inspiration as to where my verb should go

Can you do colours for oa?

many of these features remind me of some languages I know a thing or two about. indefinite articles preceding the noun and definite coming after is like old Norse ("ein skipr" one/a boat vs "skipinn" the boat). adjectives coming after nouns despite an SOV word order is a lot like ancient Gaulish, which through its history went from being more SOV to SVO, though its word order was pretty free until the last couple centuries of its existence ("sceiton rodon" red shield)

free word order would be great for poems and rhymes

damn, your german pronunciation is impressively good greetings from germany

I love your videos

Actually, in Polish, slowly appearing indefinite article comes from some (np. jakiś facet do ciebie dzwonił - some guy just called you), and it starts to be a bit common, so it isn't always from one.

I wonder if the Oa glyphs are still the same as when they were made.

What's your personal favorite consonant and vowel? Mine are /q/ and /y/

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="120">2:00</a> in the basque sentence, shouldn’t it be “child this see I”? Since the person carrying out the action is implied by dut, not ikusten.

i read this title (sideways, to be fair, and having just woken up) as "free wood order in oa". i could only wonder why you were buying lumber and then not paying for it in your conlang.

Brilliant. Y'all are like the conlang version of Lennon an Macartney. Aside: have you ever considered taking a short clip of each of the vids you appear in and stringing them together to show your change over time? It strikes me more than you, as I may watch two of your vids back to back when you created them years apart .

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="925">15:25</a> Is that like in English how you should say You and I/Me rather than the informal Me and You? I always assumed it was for politeness, but now it makes even more sense.

Can you make a Conlanging video about interrogatives and yes/no questions? Or about questions in general... I’m having trouble forming them in my Conlang :(

SO idk if this language is gonna be spoken any faster. I hope when it's done we can hear a proper expressive sentence from it. during that -n suffix in that Oa sentence, if I tried to speak faster than the speaking pace in this video, I personally found it sorta tongue-twisty when trying to speak with two different nasals (n and ng) right next to each other in Zalolon ngo (exception being mn). Maybe that's just me.

The words order of my conlang is actually crazy 😂, there are lots of variations and particolarities

Are there any common prosodic tendencies among nonconfigurational languages?

in this conlang could you do something like combine animate and ordinal numberings such as Ngaʔoalo hoa tam to mean the 2nd goat, in a group of 3? i might have that wrong i dont really understand a lot of the words here

Where do you do research for your conlang videos? I think your videos always have really good research, but when I try to find stuff about word order, phonetic inventories etc., I find almost nothing relevant, especially for more exotic languages. Could you do us, as other people probably also have problems with this, a favor and link up more of your sources, or even tell us in a video? Thanks a lot!

When I think free word order, I think Latin. And one of the few things I know in Latin is "Carthago delenda est." How would you say that in Oa?

would it be incorrect to say that english passive voice is a form of topic promenance?

What do those Edun glyphs translate to?

My brain is melting

What about when you have multiple objects for ditransitive (and tritransitive?) verbs. How do you decide the order of those elements?

what if word order marked tense?

So if a languages creators and users have access to coloured mediums would it make sense so Mark a words importance and use was marked by colour? So as an example, As for the goat, it is eating a sandwich. The goat would be red, and the sandwich would be blue, then adjectives would be marked with green. So as for the goat, it is eating a tasty sandwhich, well, you get it

I have all word orders without case-marking, verb agreement or any default order.

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="252">4:12</a> read the the first sentence again to see the second “the”

Cool

Arabic does not use 1 & 2 as numerals to count a noun, If so, they're treated as adjectives, that's why they come after nouns, in most - or all of the - Arabic dialects

At <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="270">4:30</a> does the adverb have to?

Are there any standard classifications of possible nonconfigurational languages? For example, can nonconfigurationality be achieved with either head marking or dependent marking? With either verb marking or noun marking? Are there any statistical commonalities among nonconfigurational languages? Do most have noun-verb agreement or head-dependent agreement? Do most have elaborate systems of nominal gender? Do any mark both heads and dependents? Are there any languages with _partial_ nonconfigurationality?

How do I know whether or not Jan has seen this video?

What’s with all the goat references in your Oa videos lately?

It feels so strange to actually think of this orders so naturally, other Basque speakers will agree.

in my language the word order is determined by 1) what one wishes to say; and 2) to reduce the number of words used. My language is flexible in this respect. My main maxim is “The more complex the language, the less Empathic the society”. I hold this maxim dearly to my heart, however my language does have 26 single consonants, 9 pure vowels, and numerous diphthongs and tripthongs as required. It is a Functional, Conceptual, Logical and Associative language, and tho it is very flexible, it does have Detail in order to get the message across. For example: welcome = hai’ait farewell = hai’tai The only difference is the ‘ait’ and ‘tai’. Welcome indicates no further motion so the consonant stops further vowel activity. Farewell send the person of their way so the vowels continue to be sounded longer than the consonant. Logic. One aspect of logic anyway. ‘hai’ is breathy and pleasant. ‘h’ denotes breath and therefore Life. When ‘ai’ is sounded, automatically the mouth and face forms into a smile…….you see the picture?

Arabic's not the only language that puts numbers before the noun except one. Hebrew does it too.

At <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="65">1:05</a> they talk about Hawkin's pospositional universal. I can't find this on Google, can you help me ?

Goat the big very

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="223">3:43</a> what is the difference between possesives and genetives???

I have a question regarding multiple verbs in a free word order sentence. The basic structure is topic-subject/object-verb. There is a suffix marking the subject. My problem is when multiple verbs appear along with a direct object, for example take the SVO sentence "The bat fell and hit Bob" Using my topic-based structure with the bat as the topic it would be "The bat-a Bob, fell and hit" My frustration comes from the two verbs. Even with a clear subject marker it still feels as though one could not understand how the verbs play out in the sentence and whether the direct object is also doing something. It could be interpreted as "the bat hit Bob who fell" which is not what I want. Could someone help me figure this out?

How is it that you say "sandwich" in German but not English?

The German rule is just the predicate Is at the second position

How is nonconfigurationality related to grammatical voice? Do nonconfigurational languages generally have voice distinctions? And if they do, are they well developed -- that is, are they morphophonemically stable and are they commonly used in lieu of argument reconfiguration? Are voice systems ever subsumed within the class of possible grammatical mechanisms for nonconfigurationality? For example, does any language have a conjugation scheme that can be interpreted as a system either for licensing nonconfigurationality or for indicating voice?

I feel like if you put the object first, it could be interpreted as a passive sentence. "The goat ate the sandwich" vs. "The sandwich was eaten by the goat."

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="454">7:34</a> (German native speaker here) What's that supposed to mean? Do you have a toy car that you plan to carry to the city in your pocket? That sentence could mean quite a few things, all of which are strange. It can, however, not mean that you go to the city by car. That would be "ich fahre morgen mit dem Auto in die Stadt". :-)

At <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="979">16:19</a>, impressive phoneme there. Edgar, sir, I thought you weren't able to trill an "r". What was that then, if not a trilled "r"? If that's really /B/, you could've fooled me. I listened several times, and that's /rr/, not /B/, unless I'm crazy.

i did not get a notice for this also if you go topic prominent it is unlikely Oa will have articles

The final video we have of Oa so far. I wonder if the phonology could be evolved...

I think english does do topic first with the syntax of "Bones: dogs eat them," or "The sandwich: the goat ate it." Or probably more casually "Bones. Dogs eat them." I'm not sure if that's a true topic-first syntax, since we still need to add a pronoun for it to make sense in english, but I'm thinking of so many news anchors announcing the main topic of a segment. "Bones. Do dogs eat them? We'll take a look tonight at 5..."

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="95">1:35</a> hora alpha helix or turkey neck is a low low high

The Topic-Focus distinction is wrongly explained, because it's the Focus that is the emphasized part of the sentence. The Topic being highlighted in red suggests that it's more "important" than the Focus in Topic-Prominent languages, when it can actually be the opposite. The Basque example from Wikipedia is also wrong, because the 2nd sentences means "it is DOGS who eat the bones", emphasis on the dogs as the focus. In topic-comment structures, the topic is old news, and the focus/comment is new information being added onto it. In Japanese, which explicitly marks the topic, the topic is often dropped entirely, being obvious from context.

if you added some cool inflectional system this would sound hella austronesian

>bib says hello in edun

In Turkish, you can say; Ben çantayı aldım Ben aldım çantayı Çantayı aldım ben Çantayı ben aldım Aldım ben çantayı Aldım çantayı ben And they all mean:I grabbed the bag.

What software do you use for conlanging?

I am learning Irish and this confounding language is a beast. Why did you say /kuiɟ/ and not /xuiɟ/ in the Irish example?

So if my first language (Polish) stopped being a self-respecting Slavic language and suddenly developed articles, they'd be something like jed (pronounced "yed") - indefinite, from "jeden" tyn (pronounced "tin") - definite, from "ten" ?