Post by goldensandslash on Jul 9, 2021 1:51:24 GMT
I've already previously made a thread on Wyvern Forums about my favorite language, Toki Pona. But for every yin, there's a yang. I feel that I should take the opportunity to talk about my least favorite conlang now.
For the record, Toki Pona was created as an artistic experiment by Sonja Lang, to see how few things she needed in order to create a fully functional language, as well as being created to help herself spiritually, inflecting her Taoist beliefs. Notably, Toki Pona is not intended to be an international language. That was never its goal. Nonetheless, it is a goal that I personally think it does well at anyways, and so I want it to be international. I've already talked at lengths about that though, so I won't repeat myself here.
My least favorite conlang, though? This one was specifically designed with international communication as its primary goal. So, we'll see how it does there.
Prepare to be introduced to the language... of Poliespo.
Oh boy, this is gonna be rough.
So, for starters, all of the documentation on learning Poliespo was released by the creator EXCLUSIVELY in Esperanto. Meaning that you already need to speak a conlang designed for international communication before you can learn this one.
I... just... what?
If you already speak Esperanto, why would you need to learn Poliespo, which is objectively worse in every way? Well, to be fair... this isn't really a valid complaint. The language isn't BAD, it's just poorly documented. Right? Well, buckle up.
So, I literally can only find one copy of the Poliespo documentation online, and it's missing several pages. So, basically, researching this was a nightmare. Also, I don't speak Esperanto, so I had to get help translating it from the conlang Discord community, as well as a bit of Google Translate. And uh... as if that weren't enough, the guy who wrote this made sure to use NO PARAGRAPH BREAKS.
Ugh.
It's not easy to read stuff written without paragraph breaks.
Like, at all.
Seriously, use paragraph breaks.
Anyways, before we discuss the language itself, there is one thing that I need to talk about: the guy who created it.
Poliespo was created by Billy Ray Waldon (aka Nvwtohiyada Idehesdi Sequoyah). It was designed as a polysynthetic combination of Esperanto and Cherokee... allegedly. We'll get into that later. Billy Ray Waldon claims that learning it is "your golden opportunity to acquire a Native American spirit".
WOW THAT IS RACIST.
Oh, and by the way, if you can get someone else to join the Poliespo organization, then you will receive 20% of all their membership dues over the course of their lifetime, as well as 20% of all money they give to the organization over their lifetime. Yeah. This is a pyramid scheme. Like, that's so obviously transparent that I don't even know how I'm supposed to look at this any other way...
And uh... one more thing.
After creating this language, Billy Ray Waldon decided to become a serial killer. He committed at least three murders, several rapes, and numerous other violent crimes. He was later arrested, tried, convicted, and executed. This is horrifying, and I'm not gonna dwell on this for too long (or even mention it again after this paragraph), because I mainly want to focus on the language as it stands as a work on its own, rather than on its creator. But I did want to mention it, because if I didn't, then people may be upset at me for taking this lightly. I'm not doing so. Being killed is bad and no one deserves it. I do not in any way support murder and I don't think that anything Billy Ray Waldon did is anything less than loathsome behavior.
Moving on to the actual language now...
Let's start with consonants. The consonants in Poliespo are as follows. On the left is how Poliespo writes the sound, and on the right is that same sound using its IPA symbol.
m = m
n = n
m̆ = ʰm
n̆ = ʰn
p = p
(it's complicated) = pʷ
t = t
c = ts
ĉ = tʃ
k = k
(unwritten) = ʔ
b = b
d = d
ĝ = dʒ
g = g
b̆ = ʰb
k̆ = ʰk
f = f
t̂ = θ
s = s
s̑ = ʃ
y = ç
ĥ = x
h = h
v = v
(it's complicated) = ð
z = z
j = ʒ
ŭ = w
l = l
j = j
r = r
So, I suppose I need to explain how to pronounce these, for the benefit of those not familiar with IPA symbols. So, first of all, for the symbols that are just an English letter and nothing else, you pronounce them pretty much how you pronounce them in English, with only a few exceptions. Specifically, x, j, and r. /x/ is pronounced like the "ch" in "loch" (if you're Scottish or Welsh). /j/ is pronounced like the English "y". And /r/ is pronounced like the Spanish "rr". You roll your tongue to trill it. As for the other symbols, /ʃ/ is the "sh" sound, /tʃ/ is the "ch" sound, /dʒ/ is the "j" sound, /θ/ is the unvoiced "th" sound (as in "ether"), /ð/ is the voiced "th" sound (as in "either"), and /ʒ/ is the sound in the middle of the words "vision" and "pleasure", as well as in the French "bonjour".
The /ʔ/ symbol is the glottal stop, which exists in English, but it isn't phonemic. That is to say, there are no words where you can swap ʔ for a different sound and get another word. It's the hyphen in "uh-oh". And depending on where you're from, it may also appear in your local dialect for "mountain" and "button", if you abbreviate to "mou-ain" and "bu-on".
The /ç/ sound is only found in some English dialects, and only in one word at that. The word "hue". If you pronounce it as "hyu", then you're like most people and don't use ç. But if you do make a weird hard-to-describe sound, then you're among the few that say "çu" instead. (I think this is starting to become more and more common in Australia, but it's hardly spread outside of that continent.)
The /ts/ sound does not exist in English. It does exist in languages such as Korean. It's not a hard sound to learn how to make, and it is similar to just putting a "t" sound followed by an "s" sound, like at the end of the word "affricates".
Finally, some of these sounds have the ʰ symbol before them, and this means to make an exhale slightly before speaking them, as though you were using the letter h. Similarly, the /pʷ/ sound means to follow up your p sound with a w-esque exhalation.
Yeah, this inventory is not as friendly as the inventory of consonants in Toki Pona. Or indeed, in any language I've seen. Also, some of these are supposed to be "nasally pre-aspirated". Whatever the hell that means.
So, there are several problems with these consonants. First of all, there's this website called PHOIBLE, which catalogues all the sounds every language in the world makes. And, as it turns out, there are NO LANGUAGES compatible with this. Meaning that no matter what your first language is, you have to teach yourself how to make at least one new sound in order to be able to speak Poliespo. For an international language, that's REALLY bad.
There's also the three-way distinction between /k/, /x/, and /h/. Yes, I know it's in Esperanto. No, I don't care. You should only have, at most, ONE of these sounds in your language. Because there are plenty of languages that don't distinguish between the three. Sure, English does, but English is weird.
And by far the worst offender is /pʷ/. This language is supposed to be a combination of Esperanto and Cherokee, right? Well, there is no such sound in either of those two languages, so why is this here? Also, Cherokee doesn't even have /p/, so this is even stranger.
Oh, and there's two more consonants in Poliespo that I didn't go over.
z̑ is used to represent the combination of sounds /kts/. (It's similar to how English uses the letter x to represent the combination /ks/, rather than a unique sound that can't be formed by other letter combinations.)
And, similarly, there's z̆ for /gdz/.
Well, according to the Poliespo document, these are pronounced as "one consonant". But what does that mean? It's never explained.
And now for the vowels!
i = i
ĭ = ɪ
u = u
e = e
x = ə
q = ɜ
o = o
a̷ = æ
a = a
w = ɔ
I'm not gonna go over this in comparison to English, because English's vowels are, quite frankly, a total mess. They depend very heavily on where you're from, with there being no real consensus on what vowels even exist in English at all. So if you don't know IPA symbols, just take my word for it that this is bad. An international language should only have five vowels at most, and three is ideal.
I do want to draw attention to /ɜ/ though. Billy did use the symbol ɜ to define it when he was listing his language with IPA symbols, but he also gave example words, saying that it was pronounced like the "i" in the American English pronunciation of "girl", "shirt", and "fir". Since he specified American English, we know what vowel he's talking about, but that vowel would be ɚ, not ɜ. So... I have no idea what the correct way to say this is.
There's also ten more vowels to go with these ten. These are "nasal vowels", and we will get to them later.
There's also tone. So, in some languages, like Mandarin Chinese, the tone at which you say a word influences what the word is. Speaking at a high tone means something different than saying the same set of sounds at a low tone. Or you may need to change your tone and go up and down as you move across the word, or even across a syllable. For an international language, tonality should be avoided at all costs. Yes, it exists in virtually all Chinese languages, as well as most sub-Saharan African languages, as well as a few Native American languages, but that's it. For the most part, this is not common. And there are plenty of languages, mainly those in Europe, that don't use this, including English, the most commonly-spoken language in the world.
But Poliespo includes tone. However... I can't really talk about it. Remember how I mentioned that the documentation is missing some pages? Well, the biggest gap is the section that talks about how tone works in Poliespo. So I can't really say anything confident about it other than that it exists.
Now, to be fair...
Billy Ray Waldon says that he wanted to make it easier to communicate quicker in Poliespo than in most natural languages. And, okay, sure. For that specific goal, it makes sense to have a rather large inventory of sounds that people can make, so that they can quickly tell what word you're trying to use and then you can move on. Words don't have to be as long if your language has a ludicrous number of sounds.
However, this isn't a GOOD large inventory. Like, sure, there's languages with a ton of sounds, but this is not a good collection of sounds to choose from. There's no way of looking at all of these sounds without SOMETHING feeling out of place. It really looks like Billy just threw in every sound he could think of and then left it at that. It's bad design. (I have no idea whether or not that's what actually happened, for the record.)
Anyways, we've talked about how these sounds are spoken. Now let's talk about how they're written.
So, using [ĥ] to write the /x/ sound comes from Esperanto. I'm really not a fan of writing this sound in this way. I don't like having to write diacritics because it's harder to type on my keyboard. And yet, Poliespo adds a TON of these to Esperanto's initial offerings. It's annoying. I get that you have 53 letters in your alphabet (I've only showed off 41 so far, there are twelve more incoming later on in this post). And there's only 26 letters. You know what you do at this point? Well, for an international language, this really ought to be a sign to get a smaller inventory. But if you can't do that, then just use letter combinations, like how English uses "ch" for /tʃ/, despite the /tʃ/ sound not sounding anything like English's "c" sound or "h" sound. That's what you do when you run out of letters and have more sounds to assign letters to. You assign letter combinations.
And yet, Poliespo instead goes for diacritics. But that's not even the worst part.
Let's go to those "it's complicated" bits above, when I was listing the letters. There are two letters that I said this about, specifically, the ones used to write /pʷ/ and /ð/. Now I get to explain what that means.
These are written by writing two letters AT THE SAME TIME. As in, the letters overlap each other.
/pʷ/ uses p and w and /ð/ uses t and v. (Two letters down, ten to go!)
Yeah... I can't figure out how to type these on my computer. I tried figuring it out and spent over an hour on it. I give up. If anyone knows how to type something like that on a modern computer (not an old typewriter), then go ahead and reply to this post with it and I'll copy+paste to edit it in.
To be fair, this does make some amount of sense if you ARE writing on a typewriter, where it would be easy to type two overlapping letters like that. But even so, these would look SO UGLY. Like, if someone wrote them, I'd be confused about whether they mean to overlap or if they just had their hand slip or something while writing.
Oh, and by the way, fun fact. The Poliespo documentation (y'know, the one that's hard to read because NO PARAGRAPH BREAKS) is typed. It's unclear whether it's typed on a typewriter or on a keyboard, but I'm gonna assume typewriter to make those overlap letters work. However, the diacritics are NOT typed. They were added in by hand afterwards.
(sigh)
So... even on a typewriter where it would be easy to type overlapping letters, you apparently still can't type Poliespo. At that point, just don't bother with overlapping letters either.
Let's talk about /ʔ/ next. Unlike in English, where the /ʔ/ sound isn't phonemic, /ʔ/ IS phonemic in Poliespo. Changing /ʔ/ to a different sound will, in fact, give you a different word. And despite that, you don't write the /ʔ/ sound when writing. It's kinda like the opposite of a silent letter. Where a silent letter adds a letter that doesn't make a sound, here's a sound that doesn't have a letter. Why? What's the point of this?
And now on to the vowels!
So, the vowels include [ĭ] and [a̷]. That's hard to type, but I'm okay with it in comparison to everything else. So, there are six vowels in the English alphabet: a, e, i, o, u, and y. Poliespo has ten vowels (so far, we'll get to those "nasal vowels" later). So you need more symbols than that. Using [ĭ] and [a̷] is a start, I guess. However, Poliespo doesn't use [y], because the symbol [y] is used in Poliespo to represent the consonant sound /ç/, which is... weird.
So, anyways, that means Poliespo has three vowels left to assign letters for, and since there's three unused English letters, it seemingly works out perfectly. Poliespo uses [x] for /ə/, [q] for /ɜ/, and [w] for /ɔ/.
The thing is... there's no reason, design-wise, to do that. None of these are vowel sounds, and none of them look like they represent the sounds that they represent in Poliespo.
To be fair, I do think I know why Billy did this. You see, Cherokee includes the vowel /ə̃/, which is a very rare sound in the world. English does not include it, and nor does really much else. But when you write Cherokee in the English alphabet, what do you do? It doesn't sound like the sound that is made by any of the English vowels, so writing it using one of them doesn't work. What Cherokee chooses to use is the letter [v]. This is fine, because [v] was historically a vowel, and the consonant sound /v/ isn't in Cherokee, so Cherokee has no need for [v] in any other context.
But in Poliespo? This isn't that. [x], [q], and [w] are all consonant letters. They're just assigned to vowels for no other reason other than the fact that they're available. It's bad design.
So... now let's talk about nasal vowels. Any of Poliespo's vowels can be nasalized. If this is done, you put a ̑ on whatever vowel it is. So, for example, to turn /u/ into /ũ/, you would write it as [ȗ].
There is, however, one exception, and that is the sound from Cherokee that I mentioned above. /ə̃/. Since /ə/ is written with [x], you'd logically think that this would be written with [x̑]. But it's not. This is the one exception. /ə̃/ is instead written with the number [2]. Why? Because "the number two looks like a nose". Um... right.
[2] is an Arabic numeral, so it looks completely out of place compared to everything else in this alphabet. It feels very weird seeing it in the middle of a word.
And now let's talk about tone. To write rising tone, you mark the vowel of the syllable with rising tone with a ́ diacritic. So, for instance, if the vowel was /ɜ˩˥/, then you'd write it as [q́]. As for the other tones, they just straight-up aren't written. You have no idea what tone to use when reading a word unless it's rising tone. You just have to work it out based on context. Yikes.
Everything about the way that this language is written is ugly as sin. I'll post some example text later on, but trust me when I say... it's awful.
So... as far as words go... this is VERY heavily based on Esperanto. Which, for the record, is a language that I dislike. There are, however, some unique words from Cherokee.
In Esperanto, the way you say "hello" is "saluton". But in Poliespo, it's "osijo", which comes from the Cherokee word "osiyo". There's also a Cherokee word called "dohi", which means "peace, harmony, and wellbeing". This exists in Poliespo as "toho".
And... that's it! Those are the only two words in this whole language that come from Cherokee. Wow. What garbage. Like, I get that these are good words, but it would have been cool if you could have incorporated Cherokee more into your language by using other words like these.
For the most part, everything else is just from Esperanto. There are a few original things though that Billy made himself. One such word is "pi", which I'm a fan of. It's a third-person pronoun that is gender-neutral and animacy-neutral. See, in Esperanto, when referring to someone or something in the third-person, you only have he/she/it as options. Poliespo adds "they", which is much appreciated.
The problem is that you turn nouns (and pronouns) into adjectives in Esperanto by adding an "a" to the end of the word. So this would become "pia" to mean "their", which... well... is already an Esperanto word. "pia" means "pious". So, because of this, "their" in Poliespo is "pies" instead, as a weird exception to the grammar rules that you just have to know exists. Nicely done.
Another good thing that Poliespo does over Esperanto is change how country names work.
So, in Esperanto, England is Anglujo or Anglio. Canada is Kanado. The United States of America is Usono. But then when you're referring to someone from the place, it gets messy. An Englishman in anglo. A Canadian is kanadano. And an American is usonano. This is pretty inconsistent. Poliespo cleans this up and makes it consistent.
In Poliespo, England is Anglio. Canada is Kanadio. The United States of America is Us̑io. And then an Englishman is anglo. A Canadian is kanado. And an American is us̑o. You just replace the "io" at the end with "o". Much easier. That's basically the only positive thing that I can say about this language.
Mostly, though, this language's vocabulary is identical to Esperanto. There are a TON of differences between Esperanto and Poliespo that make Poliespo noticeably worse, but that comes from grammar, not vocabulary. So... let's move on to talking about grammar.
So, Poliespo is polysynthetic, which means you can communicate quicker in Poliespo than in Esperanto or in a natural language, because you can modify a word to make an entire sentence, but each sentence is one word. For example, in order to say "I don't like bananas." in Poliespo, you just say the word banant̂a̷n2plaĉqlx (pronounced /bananθænə̃paltʃɚlə/).
Those of you who can count can clearly see that banant̂a̷n2plaĉqlx is a seven-syllable word, and "I don't like bananas" is a six-syllable sentence. So if Poliespo wants to make it easier to communicate quicker, it fails. And this is not just an isolated example. It tends to come up a lot.
This is from Cherokee, which is polysynthetic as well.
Another thing that Poliespo takes from Cherokee is adding the suffix -ĉ onto the end of sentences to turn them into questions. That's... kinda neat, but it's weird that it's a consonant and not a vowel. In actual Cherokee, you use "chu" for this, and Esperanto does a similar thing with "tsu".
Another weird thing is the way that "la" is handled, which means "the" in Esperanto.
Let's take a look at the word "cat", as an example. In Esperanto, this word is "kato" for the singular nominative, "katon" for the plural nominative, "katoj" for the singular accusative, and "katojn" for the plural accusative. If you don't know what nominative/accusative means, that's because it's mostly not in English. The nominative case is what you use when the noun is the subject, and the accusative case is what you use when the noun is the object. In English, we just use the same word for both. That is, for nouns. It is different for pronouns in English. We use "he" for a subject and "him" for an object, for instance.
Where was I? Right. The word "la". So, in Esperanto, if you want to add this to these words, you just do exactly that, forming "la kato", "la katon", "la katoj", and "la katojn".
This makes total perfect sense. And yet... Poliespo messes with it.
So, in Poliespo, the word for "cat" is "kat", "katon", "katoj", and "katojn". It's the same as Esperanto except that "kato" became "kat". But rather than just adding "la", Billy decided to add a different way of differentiating between "cats" and "the cats". You instead add a suffix that changes depending on case. So in Poliespo, you'd get "kata̷l", "katȃ̷l", "katxl", and "kat2l".
This is confusing. You're just using the nasal vowel to mark the accusative, which is... fine... I guess... but it's only used if you have a definite article on the word? You don't just do it all the time? That's just halfway wishiwashiness which serves to make your language more confusing. I mean, I'm not a fan of doing this in the first place, but if you're gonna include it, at least commit to it.
Now we get to my least favorite part of Esperanto: the gender system! Let's see how Poliespo handles it.
So, in Esperanto, you use "in" to make a noun feminine.
For instance, "patro" means father, so "patrino" means mother. Because, you know, men are the default, women are abnormal, and people of other genders don't exist.
(sigh)
I really hate sexism.
Okay, so how does Poliespo fix this? Well... it includes "iĉ" to specify male in the same way that "in" specifies female. So, for instance, "patro" now just means a parent of unspecified gender, with "patrino" meaning mother and "patriĉo" meaning father.
If it stopped there, then this would be great and I would praise it. But... that's not the case.
Billy decided to add a way of specifying that you're not specifying gender. Rather than just adding a set of characters like "in" and "iĉ", though, it is a little more complicated. You replace all the vowels (except in suffixes) in the word with other vowels.
Specifically, all instances of "a" become "w", all instances of "e" become "ê", all instances of "i" become "ĭ", all instances of "o" become "x", and all instances of "u" become "q".
So, a parent of unspecified gender is actually "pwtro". So when do you use "patro" and when do you use "pwtro"? If they both mean "parent of unspecified gender", then which is used when?
I'm not 100% sure of this, but I looked through various example words and... well... it ain't pretty.
So, remember when I said that you could add "iĉ" to make a noun masculine? Well, this specifically only applies to animals. So, for "cat", you get "kato" for gender-neutral, "katino" for female, and "katiĉo" for male cat.
But with humans, it's the alternative-vowels that get used. So, "kuzo" is the default word for cousin, which is male, and then "kuzino" is a female cousin, and "kqzo" is a cousin of unspecified gender. So... men are still the default, just... only when you're talking about people.
So, Poliespo actually has TWO ways of being spoken. One of which is called "Idpo" and the other is called "Zaespo". Until now, everything that I've been talking about has been Idpo. Zaespo is just normal Esperanto. Yes, really. It's IDENTICAL to Esperanto. All the new things that Poliespo added to Esperanto are removed and we just have normal Esperanto. So what's the point of this?
Well, according to Billy: "If someone doesn't understand what you say in Idpo, you can repeat yourself in Zaespo."
In other words, if someone doesn't understand Poliespo, you can speak Esperanto, and that still counts as speaking Poliespo.
WHAT THE HELL IS THIS!?
Look, if you need to come up with a solution for someone who already speaks your language not being able to understand it... then you made a bad language. Go back and try again. Like, there's no way to look at this without it looking like the creator of the language just... gave up. I honestly have a hard time describing in words how stupid of an idea this is.
There's also a very large part of the documentation that is labeled as "profiksoj", which I have no idea what it is supposed to be. According to Google Translate, the word "profiksoj" in Esperanto means "profits". So... I don't get it.
Oh, right, this language was a pyramid scheme. I forgot about that.
Um... why does it take up so much space though? It just... like... wow. I give up on this.
I'm hoping that this is just a mistranslation, but I'm too lazy to check everything in a document written in a language I don't speak, without any paragraph breaks. (Yes I'm still mad about having no paragraph breaks.)
So um... let me give you a sample of Poliespo text so that you can see what this language looks like in practice:
Poliespo: Osijo, samideanoj. Zwfeliĉa kêtaga̷l decidi lingva̷lqpa projekto finfine alven2.
IPA pronunciation: osijo samideanoj zɔfelitʃa kẽtagæl detsidi lingvælɜpa projekto finfine alvenẽ
Esperanto: Saluton, samideanoj. Estu feliĉaj ke la tago decidi pri la lingva projekto finfine alvenis.
English: Hello, like minded people. Be happy that the day to decide about the linguistic project has finally arrived.
So... yeah. This is my least favorite language. I have no idea why Billy Ray Waldon thought that this would be a good international language. It makes EVERY single possible wrong decision.
Well, that's not true. I actually *do* have an idea. Because Billy did mention this in the documentation... for some reason.
Apparently, Billy went to a psychic who told him that Poliespo would be widely used in the field of technology after the human race united. He also claims that Esperanto was a ripoff of Cherokee, because they both include the "po" sound, and that Zamenhof (Esperanto's creator) was clearly influenced by the spirit of Sequoyah. Poliespo was his attempt to put the Cherokee "back" into Esperanto.
Right.
So... clearly... this guy was out of his mind. There's no way that any sane person would think that any of this makes sense. Though, frankly, the fact that he was a serial killer is kinda proof that he was not at all "sane".
And yet, even in a vacuum, setting Poliespo aside from the things that its creator did... I have a hard time finding anything nice to say about the language. It's the worst language I've ever seen. I know I'm only an amateur linguist, but still.
This is total garbage.
For the record, Toki Pona was created as an artistic experiment by Sonja Lang, to see how few things she needed in order to create a fully functional language, as well as being created to help herself spiritually, inflecting her Taoist beliefs. Notably, Toki Pona is not intended to be an international language. That was never its goal. Nonetheless, it is a goal that I personally think it does well at anyways, and so I want it to be international. I've already talked at lengths about that though, so I won't repeat myself here.
My least favorite conlang, though? This one was specifically designed with international communication as its primary goal. So, we'll see how it does there.
Prepare to be introduced to the language... of Poliespo.
Oh boy, this is gonna be rough.
So, for starters, all of the documentation on learning Poliespo was released by the creator EXCLUSIVELY in Esperanto. Meaning that you already need to speak a conlang designed for international communication before you can learn this one.
I... just... what?
If you already speak Esperanto, why would you need to learn Poliespo, which is objectively worse in every way? Well, to be fair... this isn't really a valid complaint. The language isn't BAD, it's just poorly documented. Right? Well, buckle up.
So, I literally can only find one copy of the Poliespo documentation online, and it's missing several pages. So, basically, researching this was a nightmare. Also, I don't speak Esperanto, so I had to get help translating it from the conlang Discord community, as well as a bit of Google Translate. And uh... as if that weren't enough, the guy who wrote this made sure to use NO PARAGRAPH BREAKS.
Ugh.
It's not easy to read stuff written without paragraph breaks.
Like, at all.
Seriously, use paragraph breaks.
Anyways, before we discuss the language itself, there is one thing that I need to talk about: the guy who created it.
Poliespo was created by Billy Ray Waldon (aka Nvwtohiyada Idehesdi Sequoyah). It was designed as a polysynthetic combination of Esperanto and Cherokee... allegedly. We'll get into that later. Billy Ray Waldon claims that learning it is "your golden opportunity to acquire a Native American spirit".
WOW THAT IS RACIST.
Oh, and by the way, if you can get someone else to join the Poliespo organization, then you will receive 20% of all their membership dues over the course of their lifetime, as well as 20% of all money they give to the organization over their lifetime. Yeah. This is a pyramid scheme. Like, that's so obviously transparent that I don't even know how I'm supposed to look at this any other way...
And uh... one more thing.
After creating this language, Billy Ray Waldon decided to become a serial killer. He committed at least three murders, several rapes, and numerous other violent crimes. He was later arrested, tried, convicted, and executed. This is horrifying, and I'm not gonna dwell on this for too long (or even mention it again after this paragraph), because I mainly want to focus on the language as it stands as a work on its own, rather than on its creator. But I did want to mention it, because if I didn't, then people may be upset at me for taking this lightly. I'm not doing so. Being killed is bad and no one deserves it. I do not in any way support murder and I don't think that anything Billy Ray Waldon did is anything less than loathsome behavior.
Moving on to the actual language now...
Let's start with consonants. The consonants in Poliespo are as follows. On the left is how Poliespo writes the sound, and on the right is that same sound using its IPA symbol.
m = m
n = n
m̆ = ʰm
n̆ = ʰn
p = p
(it's complicated) = pʷ
t = t
c = ts
ĉ = tʃ
k = k
(unwritten) = ʔ
b = b
d = d
ĝ = dʒ
g = g
b̆ = ʰb
k̆ = ʰk
f = f
t̂ = θ
s = s
s̑ = ʃ
y = ç
ĥ = x
h = h
v = v
(it's complicated) = ð
z = z
j = ʒ
ŭ = w
l = l
j = j
r = r
So, I suppose I need to explain how to pronounce these, for the benefit of those not familiar with IPA symbols. So, first of all, for the symbols that are just an English letter and nothing else, you pronounce them pretty much how you pronounce them in English, with only a few exceptions. Specifically, x, j, and r. /x/ is pronounced like the "ch" in "loch" (if you're Scottish or Welsh). /j/ is pronounced like the English "y". And /r/ is pronounced like the Spanish "rr". You roll your tongue to trill it. As for the other symbols, /ʃ/ is the "sh" sound, /tʃ/ is the "ch" sound, /dʒ/ is the "j" sound, /θ/ is the unvoiced "th" sound (as in "ether"), /ð/ is the voiced "th" sound (as in "either"), and /ʒ/ is the sound in the middle of the words "vision" and "pleasure", as well as in the French "bonjour".
The /ʔ/ symbol is the glottal stop, which exists in English, but it isn't phonemic. That is to say, there are no words where you can swap ʔ for a different sound and get another word. It's the hyphen in "uh-oh". And depending on where you're from, it may also appear in your local dialect for "mountain" and "button", if you abbreviate to "mou-ain" and "bu-on".
The /ç/ sound is only found in some English dialects, and only in one word at that. The word "hue". If you pronounce it as "hyu", then you're like most people and don't use ç. But if you do make a weird hard-to-describe sound, then you're among the few that say "çu" instead. (I think this is starting to become more and more common in Australia, but it's hardly spread outside of that continent.)
The /ts/ sound does not exist in English. It does exist in languages such as Korean. It's not a hard sound to learn how to make, and it is similar to just putting a "t" sound followed by an "s" sound, like at the end of the word "affricates".
Finally, some of these sounds have the ʰ symbol before them, and this means to make an exhale slightly before speaking them, as though you were using the letter h. Similarly, the /pʷ/ sound means to follow up your p sound with a w-esque exhalation.
Yeah, this inventory is not as friendly as the inventory of consonants in Toki Pona. Or indeed, in any language I've seen. Also, some of these are supposed to be "nasally pre-aspirated". Whatever the hell that means.
So, there are several problems with these consonants. First of all, there's this website called PHOIBLE, which catalogues all the sounds every language in the world makes. And, as it turns out, there are NO LANGUAGES compatible with this. Meaning that no matter what your first language is, you have to teach yourself how to make at least one new sound in order to be able to speak Poliespo. For an international language, that's REALLY bad.
There's also the three-way distinction between /k/, /x/, and /h/. Yes, I know it's in Esperanto. No, I don't care. You should only have, at most, ONE of these sounds in your language. Because there are plenty of languages that don't distinguish between the three. Sure, English does, but English is weird.
And by far the worst offender is /pʷ/. This language is supposed to be a combination of Esperanto and Cherokee, right? Well, there is no such sound in either of those two languages, so why is this here? Also, Cherokee doesn't even have /p/, so this is even stranger.
Oh, and there's two more consonants in Poliespo that I didn't go over.
z̑ is used to represent the combination of sounds /kts/. (It's similar to how English uses the letter x to represent the combination /ks/, rather than a unique sound that can't be formed by other letter combinations.)
And, similarly, there's z̆ for /gdz/.
Well, according to the Poliespo document, these are pronounced as "one consonant". But what does that mean? It's never explained.
And now for the vowels!
i = i
ĭ = ɪ
u = u
e = e
x = ə
q = ɜ
o = o
a̷ = æ
a = a
w = ɔ
I'm not gonna go over this in comparison to English, because English's vowels are, quite frankly, a total mess. They depend very heavily on where you're from, with there being no real consensus on what vowels even exist in English at all. So if you don't know IPA symbols, just take my word for it that this is bad. An international language should only have five vowels at most, and three is ideal.
I do want to draw attention to /ɜ/ though. Billy did use the symbol ɜ to define it when he was listing his language with IPA symbols, but he also gave example words, saying that it was pronounced like the "i" in the American English pronunciation of "girl", "shirt", and "fir". Since he specified American English, we know what vowel he's talking about, but that vowel would be ɚ, not ɜ. So... I have no idea what the correct way to say this is.
There's also ten more vowels to go with these ten. These are "nasal vowels", and we will get to them later.
There's also tone. So, in some languages, like Mandarin Chinese, the tone at which you say a word influences what the word is. Speaking at a high tone means something different than saying the same set of sounds at a low tone. Or you may need to change your tone and go up and down as you move across the word, or even across a syllable. For an international language, tonality should be avoided at all costs. Yes, it exists in virtually all Chinese languages, as well as most sub-Saharan African languages, as well as a few Native American languages, but that's it. For the most part, this is not common. And there are plenty of languages, mainly those in Europe, that don't use this, including English, the most commonly-spoken language in the world.
But Poliespo includes tone. However... I can't really talk about it. Remember how I mentioned that the documentation is missing some pages? Well, the biggest gap is the section that talks about how tone works in Poliespo. So I can't really say anything confident about it other than that it exists.
Now, to be fair...
Billy Ray Waldon says that he wanted to make it easier to communicate quicker in Poliespo than in most natural languages. And, okay, sure. For that specific goal, it makes sense to have a rather large inventory of sounds that people can make, so that they can quickly tell what word you're trying to use and then you can move on. Words don't have to be as long if your language has a ludicrous number of sounds.
However, this isn't a GOOD large inventory. Like, sure, there's languages with a ton of sounds, but this is not a good collection of sounds to choose from. There's no way of looking at all of these sounds without SOMETHING feeling out of place. It really looks like Billy just threw in every sound he could think of and then left it at that. It's bad design. (I have no idea whether or not that's what actually happened, for the record.)
Anyways, we've talked about how these sounds are spoken. Now let's talk about how they're written.
So, using [ĥ] to write the /x/ sound comes from Esperanto. I'm really not a fan of writing this sound in this way. I don't like having to write diacritics because it's harder to type on my keyboard. And yet, Poliespo adds a TON of these to Esperanto's initial offerings. It's annoying. I get that you have 53 letters in your alphabet (I've only showed off 41 so far, there are twelve more incoming later on in this post). And there's only 26 letters. You know what you do at this point? Well, for an international language, this really ought to be a sign to get a smaller inventory. But if you can't do that, then just use letter combinations, like how English uses "ch" for /tʃ/, despite the /tʃ/ sound not sounding anything like English's "c" sound or "h" sound. That's what you do when you run out of letters and have more sounds to assign letters to. You assign letter combinations.
And yet, Poliespo instead goes for diacritics. But that's not even the worst part.
Let's go to those "it's complicated" bits above, when I was listing the letters. There are two letters that I said this about, specifically, the ones used to write /pʷ/ and /ð/. Now I get to explain what that means.
These are written by writing two letters AT THE SAME TIME. As in, the letters overlap each other.
/pʷ/ uses p and w and /ð/ uses t and v. (Two letters down, ten to go!)
Yeah... I can't figure out how to type these on my computer. I tried figuring it out and spent over an hour on it. I give up. If anyone knows how to type something like that on a modern computer (not an old typewriter), then go ahead and reply to this post with it and I'll copy+paste to edit it in.
To be fair, this does make some amount of sense if you ARE writing on a typewriter, where it would be easy to type two overlapping letters like that. But even so, these would look SO UGLY. Like, if someone wrote them, I'd be confused about whether they mean to overlap or if they just had their hand slip or something while writing.
Oh, and by the way, fun fact. The Poliespo documentation (y'know, the one that's hard to read because NO PARAGRAPH BREAKS) is typed. It's unclear whether it's typed on a typewriter or on a keyboard, but I'm gonna assume typewriter to make those overlap letters work. However, the diacritics are NOT typed. They were added in by hand afterwards.
(sigh)
So... even on a typewriter where it would be easy to type overlapping letters, you apparently still can't type Poliespo. At that point, just don't bother with overlapping letters either.
Let's talk about /ʔ/ next. Unlike in English, where the /ʔ/ sound isn't phonemic, /ʔ/ IS phonemic in Poliespo. Changing /ʔ/ to a different sound will, in fact, give you a different word. And despite that, you don't write the /ʔ/ sound when writing. It's kinda like the opposite of a silent letter. Where a silent letter adds a letter that doesn't make a sound, here's a sound that doesn't have a letter. Why? What's the point of this?
And now on to the vowels!
So, the vowels include [ĭ] and [a̷]. That's hard to type, but I'm okay with it in comparison to everything else. So, there are six vowels in the English alphabet: a, e, i, o, u, and y. Poliespo has ten vowels (so far, we'll get to those "nasal vowels" later). So you need more symbols than that. Using [ĭ] and [a̷] is a start, I guess. However, Poliespo doesn't use [y], because the symbol [y] is used in Poliespo to represent the consonant sound /ç/, which is... weird.
So, anyways, that means Poliespo has three vowels left to assign letters for, and since there's three unused English letters, it seemingly works out perfectly. Poliespo uses [x] for /ə/, [q] for /ɜ/, and [w] for /ɔ/.
The thing is... there's no reason, design-wise, to do that. None of these are vowel sounds, and none of them look like they represent the sounds that they represent in Poliespo.
To be fair, I do think I know why Billy did this. You see, Cherokee includes the vowel /ə̃/, which is a very rare sound in the world. English does not include it, and nor does really much else. But when you write Cherokee in the English alphabet, what do you do? It doesn't sound like the sound that is made by any of the English vowels, so writing it using one of them doesn't work. What Cherokee chooses to use is the letter [v]. This is fine, because [v] was historically a vowel, and the consonant sound /v/ isn't in Cherokee, so Cherokee has no need for [v] in any other context.
But in Poliespo? This isn't that. [x], [q], and [w] are all consonant letters. They're just assigned to vowels for no other reason other than the fact that they're available. It's bad design.
So... now let's talk about nasal vowels. Any of Poliespo's vowels can be nasalized. If this is done, you put a ̑ on whatever vowel it is. So, for example, to turn /u/ into /ũ/, you would write it as [ȗ].
There is, however, one exception, and that is the sound from Cherokee that I mentioned above. /ə̃/. Since /ə/ is written with [x], you'd logically think that this would be written with [x̑]. But it's not. This is the one exception. /ə̃/ is instead written with the number [2]. Why? Because "the number two looks like a nose". Um... right.
[2] is an Arabic numeral, so it looks completely out of place compared to everything else in this alphabet. It feels very weird seeing it in the middle of a word.
And now let's talk about tone. To write rising tone, you mark the vowel of the syllable with rising tone with a ́ diacritic. So, for instance, if the vowel was /ɜ˩˥/, then you'd write it as [q́]. As for the other tones, they just straight-up aren't written. You have no idea what tone to use when reading a word unless it's rising tone. You just have to work it out based on context. Yikes.
Everything about the way that this language is written is ugly as sin. I'll post some example text later on, but trust me when I say... it's awful.
So... as far as words go... this is VERY heavily based on Esperanto. Which, for the record, is a language that I dislike. There are, however, some unique words from Cherokee.
In Esperanto, the way you say "hello" is "saluton". But in Poliespo, it's "osijo", which comes from the Cherokee word "osiyo". There's also a Cherokee word called "dohi", which means "peace, harmony, and wellbeing". This exists in Poliespo as "toho".
And... that's it! Those are the only two words in this whole language that come from Cherokee. Wow. What garbage. Like, I get that these are good words, but it would have been cool if you could have incorporated Cherokee more into your language by using other words like these.
For the most part, everything else is just from Esperanto. There are a few original things though that Billy made himself. One such word is "pi", which I'm a fan of. It's a third-person pronoun that is gender-neutral and animacy-neutral. See, in Esperanto, when referring to someone or something in the third-person, you only have he/she/it as options. Poliespo adds "they", which is much appreciated.
The problem is that you turn nouns (and pronouns) into adjectives in Esperanto by adding an "a" to the end of the word. So this would become "pia" to mean "their", which... well... is already an Esperanto word. "pia" means "pious". So, because of this, "their" in Poliespo is "pies" instead, as a weird exception to the grammar rules that you just have to know exists. Nicely done.
Another good thing that Poliespo does over Esperanto is change how country names work.
So, in Esperanto, England is Anglujo or Anglio. Canada is Kanado. The United States of America is Usono. But then when you're referring to someone from the place, it gets messy. An Englishman in anglo. A Canadian is kanadano. And an American is usonano. This is pretty inconsistent. Poliespo cleans this up and makes it consistent.
In Poliespo, England is Anglio. Canada is Kanadio. The United States of America is Us̑io. And then an Englishman is anglo. A Canadian is kanado. And an American is us̑o. You just replace the "io" at the end with "o". Much easier. That's basically the only positive thing that I can say about this language.
Mostly, though, this language's vocabulary is identical to Esperanto. There are a TON of differences between Esperanto and Poliespo that make Poliespo noticeably worse, but that comes from grammar, not vocabulary. So... let's move on to talking about grammar.
So, Poliespo is polysynthetic, which means you can communicate quicker in Poliespo than in Esperanto or in a natural language, because you can modify a word to make an entire sentence, but each sentence is one word. For example, in order to say "I don't like bananas." in Poliespo, you just say the word banant̂a̷n2plaĉqlx (pronounced /bananθænə̃paltʃɚlə/).
Those of you who can count can clearly see that banant̂a̷n2plaĉqlx is a seven-syllable word, and "I don't like bananas" is a six-syllable sentence. So if Poliespo wants to make it easier to communicate quicker, it fails. And this is not just an isolated example. It tends to come up a lot.
This is from Cherokee, which is polysynthetic as well.
Another thing that Poliespo takes from Cherokee is adding the suffix -ĉ onto the end of sentences to turn them into questions. That's... kinda neat, but it's weird that it's a consonant and not a vowel. In actual Cherokee, you use "chu" for this, and Esperanto does a similar thing with "tsu".
Another weird thing is the way that "la" is handled, which means "the" in Esperanto.
Let's take a look at the word "cat", as an example. In Esperanto, this word is "kato" for the singular nominative, "katon" for the plural nominative, "katoj" for the singular accusative, and "katojn" for the plural accusative. If you don't know what nominative/accusative means, that's because it's mostly not in English. The nominative case is what you use when the noun is the subject, and the accusative case is what you use when the noun is the object. In English, we just use the same word for both. That is, for nouns. It is different for pronouns in English. We use "he" for a subject and "him" for an object, for instance.
Where was I? Right. The word "la". So, in Esperanto, if you want to add this to these words, you just do exactly that, forming "la kato", "la katon", "la katoj", and "la katojn".
This makes total perfect sense. And yet... Poliespo messes with it.
So, in Poliespo, the word for "cat" is "kat", "katon", "katoj", and "katojn". It's the same as Esperanto except that "kato" became "kat". But rather than just adding "la", Billy decided to add a different way of differentiating between "cats" and "the cats". You instead add a suffix that changes depending on case. So in Poliespo, you'd get "kata̷l", "katȃ̷l", "katxl", and "kat2l".
This is confusing. You're just using the nasal vowel to mark the accusative, which is... fine... I guess... but it's only used if you have a definite article on the word? You don't just do it all the time? That's just halfway wishiwashiness which serves to make your language more confusing. I mean, I'm not a fan of doing this in the first place, but if you're gonna include it, at least commit to it.
Now we get to my least favorite part of Esperanto: the gender system! Let's see how Poliespo handles it.
So, in Esperanto, you use "in" to make a noun feminine.
For instance, "patro" means father, so "patrino" means mother. Because, you know, men are the default, women are abnormal, and people of other genders don't exist.
(sigh)
I really hate sexism.
Okay, so how does Poliespo fix this? Well... it includes "iĉ" to specify male in the same way that "in" specifies female. So, for instance, "patro" now just means a parent of unspecified gender, with "patrino" meaning mother and "patriĉo" meaning father.
If it stopped there, then this would be great and I would praise it. But... that's not the case.
Billy decided to add a way of specifying that you're not specifying gender. Rather than just adding a set of characters like "in" and "iĉ", though, it is a little more complicated. You replace all the vowels (except in suffixes) in the word with other vowels.
Specifically, all instances of "a" become "w", all instances of "e" become "ê", all instances of "i" become "ĭ", all instances of "o" become "x", and all instances of "u" become "q".
So, a parent of unspecified gender is actually "pwtro". So when do you use "patro" and when do you use "pwtro"? If they both mean "parent of unspecified gender", then which is used when?
I'm not 100% sure of this, but I looked through various example words and... well... it ain't pretty.
So, remember when I said that you could add "iĉ" to make a noun masculine? Well, this specifically only applies to animals. So, for "cat", you get "kato" for gender-neutral, "katino" for female, and "katiĉo" for male cat.
But with humans, it's the alternative-vowels that get used. So, "kuzo" is the default word for cousin, which is male, and then "kuzino" is a female cousin, and "kqzo" is a cousin of unspecified gender. So... men are still the default, just... only when you're talking about people.
So, Poliespo actually has TWO ways of being spoken. One of which is called "Idpo" and the other is called "Zaespo". Until now, everything that I've been talking about has been Idpo. Zaespo is just normal Esperanto. Yes, really. It's IDENTICAL to Esperanto. All the new things that Poliespo added to Esperanto are removed and we just have normal Esperanto. So what's the point of this?
Well, according to Billy: "If someone doesn't understand what you say in Idpo, you can repeat yourself in Zaespo."
In other words, if someone doesn't understand Poliespo, you can speak Esperanto, and that still counts as speaking Poliespo.
WHAT THE HELL IS THIS!?
Look, if you need to come up with a solution for someone who already speaks your language not being able to understand it... then you made a bad language. Go back and try again. Like, there's no way to look at this without it looking like the creator of the language just... gave up. I honestly have a hard time describing in words how stupid of an idea this is.
There's also a very large part of the documentation that is labeled as "profiksoj", which I have no idea what it is supposed to be. According to Google Translate, the word "profiksoj" in Esperanto means "profits". So... I don't get it.
Oh, right, this language was a pyramid scheme. I forgot about that.
Um... why does it take up so much space though? It just... like... wow. I give up on this.
I'm hoping that this is just a mistranslation, but I'm too lazy to check everything in a document written in a language I don't speak, without any paragraph breaks. (Yes I'm still mad about having no paragraph breaks.)
So um... let me give you a sample of Poliespo text so that you can see what this language looks like in practice:
Poliespo: Osijo, samideanoj. Zwfeliĉa kêtaga̷l decidi lingva̷lqpa projekto finfine alven2.
IPA pronunciation: osijo samideanoj zɔfelitʃa kẽtagæl detsidi lingvælɜpa projekto finfine alvenẽ
Esperanto: Saluton, samideanoj. Estu feliĉaj ke la tago decidi pri la lingva projekto finfine alvenis.
English: Hello, like minded people. Be happy that the day to decide about the linguistic project has finally arrived.
So... yeah. This is my least favorite language. I have no idea why Billy Ray Waldon thought that this would be a good international language. It makes EVERY single possible wrong decision.
Well, that's not true. I actually *do* have an idea. Because Billy did mention this in the documentation... for some reason.
Apparently, Billy went to a psychic who told him that Poliespo would be widely used in the field of technology after the human race united. He also claims that Esperanto was a ripoff of Cherokee, because they both include the "po" sound, and that Zamenhof (Esperanto's creator) was clearly influenced by the spirit of Sequoyah. Poliespo was his attempt to put the Cherokee "back" into Esperanto.
Right.
So... clearly... this guy was out of his mind. There's no way that any sane person would think that any of this makes sense. Though, frankly, the fact that he was a serial killer is kinda proof that he was not at all "sane".
And yet, even in a vacuum, setting Poliespo aside from the things that its creator did... I have a hard time finding anything nice to say about the language. It's the worst language I've ever seen. I know I'm only an amateur linguist, but still.
This is total garbage.