Bar none, what is the absolute weirdest and most outlandish conlang you have ever encountered? Dont say javascript pls
First, interesting news! @quothalinguist and I were recently at MIT where they were doing fMRI studies on speakers of conlangs, as well as speakers of other languages, and of people who were taking a look at things that might be like language. Long story short: The brain can't distinguish conlangs from natural languages, but it can distinguish them from music, logic problems, math, and programming languages! So any time you hear anyone say, "But programming languages are languages, too!", apparently our brains don't think so.
So, the craziest conlang I ever saw was a language I followed in Conlang Relay 10 in 2004, and it turns out that the language wasn't outlandish, per se, rather it was produced via means I had to discover, and then it all made sense. It was called Metes, and it was by someone who went by the handle Rodlox.
For those who aren't familiar, a conlang relay is a bit like the game Telephone. User A translates a text into their conlang, then passes the translated text onto User B, who decodes it using a grammar and lexicon provided by User A, then translate it into their own conlang, and passes it on to User C, who does the same. It's loads of fun, because the texts wind up sounding silly by the end of it. Here's an example of the first sentence (just the English translation of it) in the first few turns of this ring of Relay 10:
Original translation in Wenedyk by Jan van Steenbergen: "O dear, what's happened? Yesterday, a pretty young girl came to our home to watch over the baby."
Next translation in Kali-sise by Jeffrey Henning: "O dear, what's happened? Yesterday, a pretty young girl came to our home to watch over the baby."
Next translation in 'Yemls by Jeff Jones: "Oh, $$$$! Has something happened?"
Next translation in Byashrei by Rebecca Harbison: "Alas! Did this really happen?"
Next translation in Proto-Drem by Kevin Urbanczyk: "Did these events just occur? Yes or No?"
So you can see how, little by little, oddities are introduced. I was number 14 in this relay. Here's number 12:
Twelfth translation in Chrol by Apollo Hogan: "'It happened', I won't say. I don't believe this."
A little strange, but still recognizable. Now here's the Metes translation by Rodlox. Now you have to understand: This is their own translation into English of their own text. (And, yes, Rodlox is a native English speaker.)
"Fitted together yesterday", Wary to speak of eternity. Wary now to speak of inquests.
Here's the rest of it:
Spoken of the infant for the year yesterday. Now the female adult relative takes suspiciously, spoken yesterday. Spoken yesterday. To thrive, the suspicious adult female relative works to see! Male adult relative ran stridingly below through the year, male adult relative. Tell now, of the need yesterday. Sing of very nervously conquering supremely yesterday of this day ’s year! Now the demon thrives completely. Related male adult now nervous, wickedly seeing the toothed demon now sticks to conquer. (?) related adult female. Now runs away. To wickedly see - to try to see - demon today completely suspicious now. Inquest - revealing completeness thriving for eternity - now to speak suspiciously. The suspicious adult relative is more suspicious now!, now to take. Fitted together yesterday" surprised by suspicious spirit, hesitant to speak of forever.
I didn't add that question mark: That's their own question mark! That is, even they are not sure what their conlang text means!
But, of course, I didn't even have that to work with. I had this:
"J\qYes-ar", attau'at-tollqW-bartabad. aubartabad-ayer-tollqW-bartabad. J\qYes-teqwos-Yer. ayer-teqWenn-bartabad-*-aWo, J\qYes- tollqW-. J\qYes- tollqW. bell-bartabad-*- aWo-aWoauau. Yer-beCW-J\eub-J\qYes- steIq-@-aWo. ayer-tell, J\qYes-teqWenn. spennd-J\qYes- sWeldsreu-sWeldsreu-WeIq-WeIq-ayer-Yer-Yer. ayer-J\eue-ayer-annnnsu-bell. ayer sWeldsreu-@ - aWo, aubartabad- annnnsu-ayer-tennnnt-steq-WeIq-*-aWo. ayer-apo-beCW. aubartabad-annnnsu-ayer-J\eue-bartabad-auau. aubartabad-J\eue-attau'at-bell- ayer-tollqW-bartabad. bartabad-aWo-aWo-ayer-as-bartabad, ayer-teqWenn. J\qYes-ar-auaubartabad-annnnsu-bartabad, attau'at-tollqW-bartabad.
This looked like absolute gobbledygook to me. I mean, set aside the capital letters, etc.; they're using X-SAMPA, which allows you to type IPA with ASCII; it's supposed to look like that. Instead, look at the distribution of [n]. It occurs either twice in a row or four times in a row. And this isn't a romanization: This is how it's pronounced! You'll also notice [n] never occurs singly.
The grammar notes I was given are here (minus the English translation). Of note, this was the entirety of the grammar:
Metes is neither SVO, VSO, or anything else...it adopts the grammatical sequence of the speaker -- I might say something in VSO, but you could reply in SVO or any other form, and neither of us would be violating Metes grammar.
Linking forms
Male - /schwa/ @ Female - /macron/ * Impolite - /^/ ^
'Impolite' refers to items and subjects (such as porcupines) too dangerous, & (such as babies) where custom overrides grammar (the Metes consider it to be bad luck - in the most extreme way - to inquire as to a newborn's gender).
This is nice information, to be sure, but woefully incomplete when it comes to translating a text in a language you've never encountered before. The lexicon was equally baffling. Here's a short sample:
WORD (in X-SAMPA) _=_ Original Definition . Metes-specific definitions
amb _=_ Around . annnn _=_ On . annnnq _=_ Tight, painfully constricted, painful . annnnsu _=_ Spirit, demon . annnnt _=_ Front, forehead . annnnatuh _=_ worn on forehead . annnnatuann _=_ (?) on forehead . apo _=_ Off, away . apoJ\annnnu _=_ send away {be rid of} a demon . apotannnnsu _=_ off demon/spirit (mistranslation or religious name?) . ar- _=_ To fit together . arq _=_ To shine; white; the shining or white metal, silver . ararq _=_ to fit together metals {welding? mosaics?} .
A lot of these words never appear in the text. The thing that blew me away were the question marks. I was like, "You created this! Why are you asking me?!"
The translation was utterly baffling. The first sentence, for example, is:
"J\qYes-ar", attau'at-tollqW-bartabad.
If you go to the lexicon and replace the relevant elements with meanings, that comes out to:
"Yesterday-to-fit-together", beyond-a-year-to-speak-hairy good-something-suspicious-something-that-is-suspected-to-not-be-as-good-as-it-should/might-be.
Combine that with the grammar above, and...what is that?
I did my best to finesse some sort of meaning out of this text, but it utterly baffled me. The things that kept me spiraling were the question marks, as if the creator didn't know what some of this stuff meant, the refusal to give anything a fixed, simple definition, and the bizarre sequences of consonants, with so many occurring two in a row, four in a row... Something was off here, and I couldn't figure it out.
I was stuck on this word "bartabad" that was partially defined as "hairy". It reminded me of the PIE word that ultimately gave us "beard". I did some poking around, and then I found a list online of PIE roots in rough alphabetical order that corresponded in meaning very closely with the list of words in the Metes lexicon.
And that's when I figured out what happened.
Metes essentially uses PIE roots with reconstructed meanings and has sound changes applied, where the "sound change" is a simple find-and-replace that you can do in a word processor.
So, for example, if *h₂enǵʰ- is a root for "tight" or "compressed", you replace h2 (or h generally) with zero, en is replaced by an, ǵʰ is replaced by q, and somewhere along the line, there was a find-and-replace error that caused all the duplication in consonants to happen. There were question marks about what the meanings were, because it wasn't clear what these things would mean if they were put together! It was essentially someone building a conlang based on things they heard others doing without perfectly understanding exactly what they had done. It was all done systematically, but not in a way that would produce something one could identify as a consistent language.
So yeah, that was the biggest head trip for me when looking at a conlang. But sometimes not perfectly understanding how something works allows you to produce something that is absolutely wild—something that no one could create on purpose if they tried. And that's why, almost 20 years later, I still remember Metes. It's made more of an impression than a lot of other conlangs that were technically better. It was something!
