Me, who knows nothing about conlangs or how language works: "Ah yes, a foolish mistake indeed!"

"I didn't even know how the IPA worked at the time." Me, who doesn't know how the IPA works: "Rookie mistake."

Bibliaridion: Designs a language nobody can translate *The US military would like to know your location*

Biblaridion: *Doesn't want his language to sound weird* Biblaridion: Basically puts all other weird stuff he finds

"I'm gonna simplify Latin" *5 months later "Alright, I'm gonna add unique features of Comanche in my language"

There is a parallel universe somewhere, where he does not delete the file, and Thandian becomes an international auxilliary language in about 500 years.

I LOVE horrible conlangs. They're chaotic, unpredictable, unapologetically complex... love it

What I expected: Some tips about common pitfalls that beginning conlangers fall into and how to avoid them. What I got: *confused screaming*

"I needed AT LEAST as many cases as Finnish." - said no one else, ever. Not even Finns.

How not to make a conlang: Dont take English and make the letters look different

We once had to analyse a book in class, and this one girl counted every single noun, verb and adjective, because she thought that the amount of each type of word had a deeper meaning within the storyline. I feel a similar energy with this video.

Instructions unclear, created a creepy version of Latin.

15 cases and 6 numbers?! So every single noun has 90 possible endings. I clap in linguistical pain to you sir.

"Three different terms for good." The naturalistic language part of my brain is screaming whilst the part of my brain that wants to be able to describe specific concepts with scientific or philosophical accuracy is applauding.

*Me after binge-watching biblaridion, xidnaf and conlang critic*: “You know, I’m something of linguist myself”

Imagine an alternate universe where he discovered Tsez while making Thandian

Addict: "I need my fix!" Bib: "I need my affixes!"

So, you basically invented Hungarian?

Tolkien didn't made a language for his novels, he made some novels to show his languages

Have you ever tried to make "old Thandian"? As in a fixed version removing all the stuff added by scholars centuries later who tried to re-create it. That could be a cool story for Franken-Thandian, its the extreme version of what they are doing with re-creating Mayan. Except in your case the scholars had no descendants of the native speakers to learn from

Why did you delete that file? Now how will we ever learn to speak Thandian?

I don't understand anything that is being said in this video. This is the first time I've even heard the word "conlang". I'm not sure how this ended up in my recommended...

I actually created a language a while ago to be used in a fictional setting, as a sacred language for a group of people who valued simplicity. The language currently has about 150 words and is modeled after Swahili. I think what made that so successful for me was the fact that the grammar rules weren’t that rigid, and it ultimately didn’t matter if things weren’t exact, only that the meaning got across. I still have the rough draft, and it will probably become super cringey in a few teases, but I’m still prearranged darn proud of it.

"About 4 years ago" *shows 2013* It was then I realized... this isn't a recent video

How *NOT* to make a language: Don't take Esperanto and rename it.

*your language* “hey can i copy your homework?” *every other language* “ok just dont make it o...” *your language* “OK THANKS!”

Honestly I could imagine a culture coming up with a writing system that works like that. Not everyone has a great understanding of phonology

Oh but I actually love the idea of natlang using different roots for time and space words. And then build their whole culture about their perception of these two kinds of dimension. Super fascinating! Also! Don't be so hard on yourself! I think you first language is actually cute. I mean.. It's not "good", but you can just feel the innocent enthusiasm of someone who is just learning about languages when looking at it. And I believe that's wonderful! One step closer to perfection

At first, I was all like "why is the music so spooky?" then i realized it's because of the horror we were about to observe

Verbs agree with nouns? = Perectly rational Adjectives agree with nouns? = Completely irrational! The young Biblaridion was an interesting person.

When I first decided I wanted to create a language, I literally didn't even know conlanging existed. I literally just took a list of all the words in english and assigned gibberish words to each of them. After, I wanted to make a bunch of symbols, so I tried to get all the phononems and dipthongs and sounds and make symbols for each of them. Then I made the word alpha have the symbol for alpha, and so on, and then on. I didn't know the IPA existed and just tried to figure out the different sounds in english. On the web it said there were 44 phononems and there were also mixtures of these so I tried to make symbols for each of these. I also made each astronomical thing have a symbol, like for example capricorn would have a capricorn symbol. I tried to split up c into two different sounds and change u and do a bunch of other weird things. It was really really dumb. I saw some simple things on the web about how to make a language. It was really basic and barely talked about all the complicated things that go into a language. And then I saw Artefexian's series and watched it, and I realized making a language was much more complicated than I thought. When this video first popped up, I said to myself that I liked Artefexian and shouldn't watch all these "weird" other people. And then Biblaridion popped up in one of Artefexian's videos so I decided to watch this video.

Y'all the first language I ever had any success in learning was Japanese, which I'm working on to this day, but what that means in terms of conlangs is that I consistently forget that not every SOV language uses particles and that no, I don't have to have ridiculous amounts of variations and conjugations. Just because Japanese does it does NOT mean I should.

The moral of the story is, don't go to turkey

"So it was one to one with Latin" "That's not so ba-" "Well I guess I'll throw that in, too" "I don't know about this..." "Phonology. It's English." "Now you're pushing it..." "U is oo, eI is ã" "Dear god." "No grammatical gender. But literally has everything else that most people never heard of" "You're killing me." "A ton of cases" "Stop my head hurts"

My internal linguistics brain was like "ffs! use "dh" for [ð]!" and then I realized I said it aloud and no one knew what I was talking about and I looked like a crazy person.

I think my favorite part is that every individual aspect of the language, or even any given group of aspects, could reasonably arise in some form in a naturalistic language. The issue when creating a naturalistic language is treating these concepts like lego bricks that you can stick together however you want

"my own language" *expecting English* "Latin" so you didn't do English in school?

I was reading a story which had an artificial language which was created to be extremely difficult to translate to control information and allow secret communication between leaders by using redundant grammatical and structural features to act as a sort of checksum. Good job doing that without trying.

One thing to note is that even though the final result was not something that you're proud of, it served the purpose of learning. It made you excited to learn a lot about new things, apply them, and open the possibilities to make a mess and discover. If you want to learn something, I think this approach is the best one

6:39 is nobody gonna talk about how it says *" cotact us "*

Ooooohhhhh so that's how English was made.

If you're making a language that's supposed to be naturalistic, the important thing to bear in mind is the culture and identity of the people you're creating it for. Always let that sense of culture dictate what features do and don't go into your language.

Should have watched this when I tried to make up a language when I was 5

This is my first introduction to conlangs and I'm just sitting here like: Oh no! A rookie mistake! One of the classic blunders!

**ends up making a language**

Karthin! (??) Might be cringey to look back on your own handiwork, but for me it was a fun showcase of exactly why some of us return to language building over the years - creatively exploring how linguistic features work together.

English speakers: *Have troubles understanding phonetics* Spanish speakers: *Laughs in always having the same sound for each letter*

I've been making conlangs for quite a while now, closing in on a decade, and I only have one that I'm really, really proud of. And just to prove that it can pass for a real language, I've actually been teaching myself to read and write it. All I have to do is look up roots I don't know and I can construct a solid simple or compound sentence. I'm still working on how to make complex statements, and temporal and spatial references are something I'm struggling to get hold of (as I haven't given them nearly enough thought), but all in all I think it's pretty decent so far.

I have no idea what a Conlang is but I'm just over here like "hmm yes indeed that is correct."

I feel like you were so caught up in making a cool and complex language you lost sight of the point of language, to easily transmit knowledge. Once you hit a certain point it just becomes confusing as hell

I find it incredibly entertaining to hear you go on about adding about 6 features every time, me going 'that's not too terrible', and then you showing the 21 other features you added on top of those.

I applaud your willingness to share your early attempts at conlanging despite your embarrassment. My earliest attempts at conlangs (many years ago) are much worse in my opinion than you judged your own. My only saving grace was that I was so disorganized that I never retained any of my notes.

All in all, remember that language has two main goals: • _To make it easy to tell information_ (includes speaking and writing sentences) • _To make it easy to understand information_ (includes reading and hearing sentences, along with differentiating words/phrases from each other) If your language is hard on either end, then it needs revisions. A good language has at least some sort of a balance between the two.

Aw, don't delete it. I never look at Yeltax anymore, but it's still around if I want to check in on it. Anyway, I'm surprised you didn't learn Turkish and say "I must have vowel harmony", but it sounds like you're not nearly as phonology focused as I am.

This isn't quite as bad as I expected. The part with conjunctive affixes, for example, doesn't seem completely impossible for a real language to evolve over time. A lot of people's first conlang is just "I went into an English dictionary, crossed out every word, and added my own"

I've once created a language called „saberovian“, with some 20 words, no defined alphabet, phonology or anything else...

Hey, at least you didn’t include every single consonant and 6 different ways to pronounce 20 vowels, just because Vietnamese has a lot of vowels.

Welsh: * Has 2 dental fricatives * Welsh: Newn ni alw'r un lleisiol yn 'dd' a'r un arall yn 'th'. Thandian: TH

12:24 Italian actually has this exact feature! we have "bravo" for expressing skill (Im good at this) "bene" for saying well (I'm doing good) or good as a noun (the good in the world), and "buono" meaning a morally good person or a good food

I watched this video twice: one sound a year ago, and once today. The difference in how much I understood and was able to learn is absolutely staggering. I having even say down and actually tried to make my language, but after watching this again, I am pumped to try again. I was able to pick up on so much more this time round. I want to watch this video again a year from now, and see how much further I grow as a person and as a conlang creator.

see to me this would be a language for magic. something needlessly complex that requires years of study, nothing is natural and everything must be precise to work properly

How NOT to Make a Language: Don't be English.

Well here’s something that you did right in making your language: now I want to continue learning french and Ukrainian. Language is a fascinating thing but I’ve stopped being fascinated by it recently. I can see how passionate you are about linguistics through this project and it reminded me of why I wanted to learn grammar structures from different languages in the first place. 1. Because I want to be able to speak them eventually And 2. (Especially for uncommon languages like Ukrainian) just because I think the way different cultures communicate is really cool. So thanks for making Thandian even though it was such a dumpster fire

Ah yes, The Silmarillion. The book that has sent far too many conlangers down this hellish rabbit hole.

My conlang sounds really ugly :( I did the EXACT same thing as you did (added too much stuff) And also, I have no idea why, but I was hellbent on using mostly monosyllabic words, and that's why it sounds like a person is having a seizure and is talking to the devil at the same time. But I'm happy with how my writing system looks tho. Thanks!

"Well, I've gotta put this in there too..." - Biblaridion, 2014

I think *everyone* who dives into this hobby winds up with a 'kitchen sink conlang' aka Frankenlang early on, which we hide away in the closet once we recognize what a monster it is. I salute you for being brave enough to not only share this, but to dissect it in front of us!

To me, over-complicated or "wrong" conlangs just imply a very long, weird, intricate, complex history of the language's development. Like, why is English the way it is? Because it has roots in a bunch of languages. Why does Thandian have three different ways of meaning the same thing with no discernible correct term? Because it came from proto-Thandian mixed with Old Thandian and High Thandian and its modern speakers use different versions and dialects across the country. It can make things really interesting.

1) I hope you didn't really delete your Thandian file. It's important to see how far you've come & there was a lot of valuable education in it. 2) I am certainly convinced that you can't make ANY naturalistic anything without wider use. As more people use something, they will (naturally) streamline & clarify it. If u asked native Spanish speakers to translate Spanish into Thandian, they would need the gendered nouns but native English speakers wouldn't. Native Turkish would similarly seek a way to all of their native Turkish stuff in Thandian. In a sense, what you might have been inadvertently creating was a "universal print language" while everyone speaks their own core verbal language like Chinese is. 3) Action is always driven by belief. Thus the motivation for language evolution & result is caused by evolution in the people's core beliefs. If the people had no belief in the passage of time, only the universality of NOW, they may very well develop a language which lack future AND past tenses. Every statement is "I act". "I eat breakfast." would include all 3: "I ate breakfast this morning. I will eat breakfast tomorrow. I am eating breakfast now." Similarly, there may not be different words for different meals. Instead of saying breakfast, the sentence may simply be "I eat." 4) I am Groot. 5) On further consideration, Thandian sounds like the perfect written language for a bloated, corrupt empire who is trying to please everyone under them in the final years before they collapse. The penal code reaches to millions of pages. New laws are hundreds or even thousands. There is no way to not break the law, but there is noone who actually understands the law so no one knows if what you did was illegal or not. Similarly, everyone is adding & bloating the language so fast & fat that there are actually dozens of languages which all happen to use the same glyphs. It's NOT that Thandian was "bad", but it didn't suit your intended purpose. This idea gives it purpose, a new lease on life. 6) This is the core problem w hobby worldbuilding or worldbuilding without focus on the story. The people who speak & use the language shape the grammer & usage much more than the rules do. You Grok?

In my D&D game world I had made the bare essentials for a dozen or so conlangs and gave the ones known to my players, for example the Dwarf of the party got Dwarvish/Dweorgumal pages of a dictionary and some common sentences. If they wanted to say something in dwarvish to a stronger effect, for example to threaten another dwarf-speaker, they could actually try and wrangle the words into something and I'd usually give them advantage on the intimidation for the effort. The languages themselves would be developed on my own time though their psuedo-forms would be used by the players -- that way I could focus more on the other aspects of world-building while content with the languages I had.

There's another habit of beginner conlangers that you also had, but I'm not sure you explicitly said in the video: assuming that grammar is only morphology. Syntax is often ignored, even by experienced conlangers. I'm looking at you, Dr. Zamenhof and your "rules for Esperanto".

I do not know how I came across this video since this is the first time I watch something about conlanging, but it was definitely interesting! Besides, I want to add that what you state at the end is true for any project: when you make mistakes and regret them - and that happens every time - do not feel discouraged; instead, learn from them to improve yourself. It's a very positive approach and I think it helps people quit their comfort zone. You've got a new sub :)

I clicked this thinking it was about programming languages. Sometimes I forget words like "syntax" and "grammar" have meaning outside CompSci.

I am learning a fourth language right now (and subsequently forgetting my third one) and your video got suggested. I have never in my life thought about creating my own language and I don't know how the algorithm thought this could possibly interest me. Apart from your voice being annoying yet pleasant at the same time I actually learned a lot about languages in general. I didn't even notice that there were two "th" versions. This is a great video, you deserve more views and I hope this gets suggested to a lot more people because once the algorithm ball gets rolling it sure ain't stopping. I wish you the best of luck and a lot of inspiration for future videos. Thank you for taking your time to produce this piece!

"A" in thandian script is something I've seen in churches 😂

That space/time thing actually seems pretty cool lol

*And people said math was hard...*

the 'moral of the story' is actually great advice for literally any long-term endeavor, not just conlang.

So you had separate suffixes for -ity, -tude, and -ness, which turn adjectives into nouns. Ah! But what did you have for -ful (beautiful, wasteful, etc.), which turns nouns into adjectives?

I come back to this video every few years. Priceless advice thats important to remind yourself of

My school needs a conlang/phonology club so that I can understand this crap XD

Your background music is A+ subtly back there enhancing the mood I like it

I made a weird "rune language" for my fantasy world... originally it only had runes for ideas and no grammar, because the race using it could read minds and they only used the language for spells and religious rituals... I added the most basic grammar possible into it, explaining that dwarves took on that language but they do not read minds or use magic, so they added simplistic symbols into it, which carried grammar into the language... in the end every sentence ended up as "I be light peace giant" and at that I ended with "giving up" and made a historical event when dwarves gave up on said language and instead started using human languages for diplomacy instead...

A good way to end the day after spending it basically tearing down my main language and beginning to reconstruct it into a better form.

Wow, I didn't know there was such a thing as "conlanging". What do conlangers do with their languages once they've invented them? Show them off to each other? I played around with inventing a language when I was a teenager, and because my obsessions were simplicity and minimalism I pretty much avoided the pitfalls you listed here. What I lacked was sticktoitiveness -- I got nowhere near as far on my language as you got on yours, so respect!

I've never made a language, but it does seem interesting (and like a lot of work) I'm a native speaker of Finnish, and having learned English, German, Swedish, Latin, ancient Greek, and Russian at some point in my life, plus taking courses on linguistics and phonology in university, you can just imagine my sheer horror when you started describing your first conlang This video definitely is a useful guide and a grim warning

Holy crap, i actually thought your video was removed, because i forgot the channel name. Thank you, i will never forget this video ever again. My nostalgia has finally been revisited.

“Wierd sounds” Me a european who uses those “HEY”

"You speak craziness, Earth boy! More organs means more human!"

I have NEVER thought about the space/times thing you mentioned, but it made me immediately think of Einstein. It almost feels like... we humans were actually subconsciously aware of spacetime as one thing and NOT two separate entities. Which seems weird because spacetime is not an easy concept to grasp, but apparently, in our language, we all already understand it...

Bib was so preocupied with wether or not he could that he didn't stop to think if he should

Thanks Bib! Wanted to create my own language for a invented race for d'n'd. I've always had an interest in the plethora of methods and techniques to encode and convey information. I am german, fluent in english, studied latin for 5 years and looked into french, spanish, arabic, hebrew, old greek, japanese and nahuatl by myself. While digging deeper into the grammar of those languages I unevitably looked into nouncases, all possible ways to conjugate a verb and so much more. Your series helped a lot. I knew what i had to look for and aside from obvious flaws, like parts of the phonetic inventory, my manner of romanization or the lack of irregualirities, i am very happy with my first conlang. Would have been much harder and more time consuming without your insights and thanks to you Nawari can be spoken by my fictional nazca-like bird-people

Video: How NOT to Make a Language Ad: Grammarly

The way he said “rpg group I was involved with” sounded like a cult

there are a lot of features here where I'm like "oh wow, that's cool, that's really cool" and then you kept going and I was like "oh, oh no, please stop"

Thandian: 8:13 Klingon: Allow me to introduce myself.

i'm interested in creating a language and this made me realize it's gonna be like a billion times harder than i thought lmao

*music starts* "Am I listening to an SCP video?"

Exactly explaining what I did for both my first and second conlangs.

Just an excellent video. Great job.