Conlang Critic (Web Video)

"Welcome to Conlang Critic, the show that gets facts wrong about your favorite conlang! I'm jan Misali, and in this episode we'll be taking a look at…"

—jan Misali, at the start of every episode.

Conlang Critic is an online Video Review Show created by Mitch Halley, a.k.a. jan Misali. It reviews various constructed languages (conlangs), while Misali gives his thoughts and opinions about them. There is a playlist of the full series, starting with Episode One: Lojban.

Conlangs that we have pages sort of about, that the series has covered, include:

This series provides examples of:

Bait-and-Switch Comment: From the Zese episode:
For example, Vötgil completely lacks the third person pronouns, which is ridiculous and not something you would ever do twice.
So, in Zese, the third person pronouns are also completely absent! There just, aren't any!
What the entire heck, Jack Eisenmann. There's no way that was an accident.
Blowing a Raspberry: Implied while reviewing the joke conlang kay(f)bop(t); after making up a bunch of scientific-sounding names for the facepalm (faciomanual click), clap (percussive bimanual stop), left-click, and right-click (sinistral and dextral lateral clicks), he laments that the language didn't include a "linguolabial trill". ^note
Blunt "No": On disambiguating between English and Iqglic:
jan Misali: I asked Jack Eisenmann if there’s a way to differentiate between them, and he said, quote, “no”.
Boring, but Practical: The five vowel system, /i u e o a/. jan Misali calls this "the most sensible vowel system for an IAL to use, and there’s not really any reason to use anything else, unless you wanna go for a three vowel system." Thus, he rapidly runs out of interesting things to say about it.
Broke the Rating Scale: Informally with Poliespo.
jan Misali: up until now, I haven’t come across an auxlang worse than Vötgil. it’s been my reference point for just how bad an auxlang can be. Poliespo is worse than Vötgil, but Vötgil is so much better than Poliespo that comparing the two at all is an insult to Vötgil.
Buffy Speak: In the intro to the Iqglic episode, Misali has some trouble introducing the language, due to it being pronounced the same as "English", which he explains thus:
jan Misali: I’m jan Misali, and in this episode, we’ll be looking at the language that, I mean, it’s not that it’s hard to pronounce the name, it’s more that it’s hard to say its name out loud in a way that makes it clear what language you’re talking about.
Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": Lampshaded when conlangs invent their own labels for parts of speech. From the Loglan and Kēlen episodes, respectively:
jan Misali: I don’t know why these logical languages are so determined to trick people into thinking that they don’t have verbs. verbs are like the basis of the entire vocabulary! it’s okay, you can embrace it!
jan Misali: when I first heard the concept of Kēlen, I was immediately sceptical. no verbs? that can’t be right. how would that even work? surely, what Kēlen does is relabel its verbs a way that disguises their function, or maybe there’s just a large set of things that you can’t say in Kēlen. right?
Call-Back: From the Iqglic episode to the Vötgil episode, due to both conlangs being made by the same creator.
Catchphrase: In the Ido episode, jan Misali briefly considers making one for the five vowel system, as he has run out of interesting things to say about it.
Conlang: The premise of the show is to cover and critique these.
Couch Gag: Conlangs are typically introduced with a pithy description alongside their name. Sometimes this is a literal translation of the conlang's name into English (Sambahsa-Mundialect becomes "the same language world language"), or a descriptive phrase taken from the reference material.
Damned by Faint Praise: In the Lingwa de Planeta episode, he thinks the titular IAL is "halfway there to being better than just ‘okay’".
Dark Horse Victory: The philosophical conlang Toki Pona would otherwise be reviewed as an artlang, but due to its simplicity, learnability, and avoidance of common IAL pitfalls, Misali considers it to outclass all conlangs designed for international communication. As a result, it gets ranked as the best interlang, a category it wasn't even going for, retaining this position until the ranking system's eventual abandonment.
Death of the Authorinvoked: Discussed in the Iqglic episode.
jan Misali: what is the true nature of this conlang? is the true version the way it’s described by the reference grammar, or is it what was intended by its creator? are mistakes in the official documentation truly part of the language? is the word for bush really pronounced /bush/?^note
The Dreaded: Sambahsa's verbs are characterized like this, with Misali trying to avoid discussing them for as long as possible.
Early-Installment Weirdness:
- Some older episodes don't go into much detail about some aspects of the conlang. It's also notorious for not really caring that much about the grammar.
- To a lesser extent, the rankings of conlangs among Seasons 1 and 2. By Season 3, which started with Dothraki, jan Misali decided to drift away from this methodology, focusing more on how he feels about conlangs individually, as opposed to how he feels about how they stack up compared to one another.
Exactly What It Says on the Tin: It's a series about analyzing, and often reviewing, the design of constructed languages.
Existential Horror: The High Valyrian episode has very light undertones of this, compared to the unquestioned formula of prior episodes. The script repeatedly dips into questioning the point of the series, the self-perceived lack of meaningful commentary, jan Misali's qualifications, whether he is burnt out on the series, and why the episode was so highly requested. However, this meta-commentary is mostly to pad out the video, as Misali didn't have enough to say about the conlang itself. Before the episode came out, he had already announced that he would be taking back creative control as to which conlangs are reviewed, and how often Conlang Critic episodes are made.
Facepalm: The joke conlang kay(f)bop(t) uses the facepalm as part of its phonology. While reviewing the language, Misali coined the pseudo-linguistic term "faciomanual click" for anyone who wants to sound properly scientific when discussing it, although it is more accurately a percussive consonant.
Fantastic Naming Convention: The Drsk episode discusses how the way its speakers are named reflects on what is valuable to its conculture.
Foreshadowing: Used rather blatantly to lead up to the Esperanto episode without explicitly revealing an Esperanto episode.
Formula-Breaking Episode:
- Included in the Conlang Critic series playlist is the jocular "The Perfect Language [Epic]". It has a different host, self-referred to as "jan Mike Wazowski" and "jan Mike Sullivan", and recorded using OBS and Windows Notepad instead of a slideshow format. Although the video is purportedly a review of English, the language described is oligosynthetic, has only four phonemes, and is written with punctuation symbols and the digit 5 instead of Latin letters.
- The Viossa episode uses a different format due to covering an artificial pidgin with no rigid or written rules. The episode plays out like an audio-based documentary, cutting between interviews of several members of Viossa's community. Ultimately, jan Misali expresses that rating the language would be missing its point, so the verdict boils down to "Viossa reminded me why I love linguistics."
Genuine Human Hide: Zese is accused of being a programming language wearing a spoken language's skin.
Gratuitous Foreign Language: Done with the titular conlang for the intro of the Toki Pona episode, to demonstrate Misali's fluency in the language and help argue that it's easy to learn.
Holding Both Sides of the Conversation: Averted in the Lingwa de Planeta episode's "What’s the Most Commonly Spoken Language Whose Consonant Inventory Is Incompatible with That of This Particular International Auxiliary Language?" segment.
jan Misali: welcome, Lingwa de Planeta, it’s great to have you here on the show. I am talking to a language right now.
I Am Not Shazaminvoked: jan Misali doesn't like being called Conlang Critic; it's just the name of the show. Eventually defied as the YouTube channel was renamed from "Conlang Critic" to "jan Misali", and its focus shifted to a wider variety of content anyway.
Infodump:
- The segment on Sambahsa's verbs opens with a giant conjugation table, then devolves into a montage of overlapping passages from the language's densely written reference grammar.
  jan Misali: and really it’s exactly as simple as it sounds.
- Most of the Lingwa de Planeta episode is dedicated to informing new viewers, subscribed from non-linguistics videos on the jan Misali channel, on the basics of linguistics and conlanging that the show deals with. Although there were explanations of some concepts before that episode, the show and the basic segments had no formal introduction until that episode four years in, on the assumption that its Target Audience was already familiar with the subject matter.
Irony: Points out in his review of Native Tongue's Láadan that, despite being designed as a feminist language, it still divides genders into "male" and "not-male" (with no room for nonbinary people).
Let's See YOU Do Better!: Misali hadn't made a conlang before, but was so disappointed by Futurese that he inflicted this upon himself and started making his own hypothetical future version of English.
Malicious Misnaming: The Esperanto episode seems to use a version of this, failing to mention the last name of its creator, L. L. Zamenhof, anywhere in the script. He is instead called Dr. Hoper^note and "Dr. Lejzer"^note. In other episodes, First-Name Basis is used to condescending effect.
Manual Misprintinvoked: Integrated into the show when a passage in the conlang's reference grammar appears to be outright false, whether accidentally or deliberately.
Men Are Generic, Women Are Special: To jan Misali's chagrin, this tends to crop up in IALs that base their noun classes on European natural languages, like by treating masculine as the default grammatical gender and using a feminizing suffix. Misali contends that the conlangs' creators had the opportunity to correct this by designing a more neutral system, and gives credit to Ido for doing so.
Musical Episode: The Solresol episode, as the conlang in question is based on the notes of the major scale, and can be communicated through mediums such as solfège, song, and instrumental performance. Misali combines all three of these options when pronouncing Solresol words.
Non-Indicative Name: Misali points out that the name of Vötgil, a conlang designed as a simplified version of English, translates to "the opposite of English".
No Sense of Humor: Misali suggests this of Esperanto's community while commenting on the slightly nonstandard translations the episode has used. At least one Esperantist commenter took the matter very seriously anyway, with their comments becoming a Running Gag on the channel.
"Not So Different" Remark: Misali realizes the similarities between Conlang Critic and the official Vötgil video lessons…
jan Misali: white text? black background? short, direct videos full of slightly wrong linguistic information? have I been unknowingly copying this guy's style this entire time?
Once Original, Now Commoninvoked: The sentiment paints some of Misali's thoughts on Quenya.
jan Misali: the distinct European-ness of the Elvish languages shouldn’t be overlooked. I understand why this influence exists, and why Tolkien chose to represent his elves this way, it’s just that after a full century of fantasy languages inspired by Tolkien, stuff like this feels way more boring than it did when it was new.
Overly Long Name: A recurring game show–styled segment is named "What’s the Most Commonly Spoken Language Whose Consonant Inventory Is Incompatible with That of This Particular International Auxiliary Language?" In the YouTube chapter titles, it's initialized to "WtMCSLWCIIIwToTPIAL?", which is shorter but arguably all the more unwieldy.
Overused Running Gag: When it comes to the Zese conlang, "you know what Zese!" This is even used twice in the previous episode, where Misali says "dang I hope you liked that pun because I’m gonna make it so many times in the next episode, you have no idea."
Please Select New City Name: Inverted with urges for IALs to use endonyms^note for country and language names. The recurring "what do you call Germany?" and "what do you call Japan?" segments are dedicated to this.
Rock Bottom: Misali can't imagine a worse conlang than Poliespo, describing it as the bottom of a chasm. He tries to comfort ex-conlangers by telling them their attempts at conlangs couldn't possibly be as bad.
Running Gag:
- The word vore, due to a freak coincidence being the Lojban word for 42, such as in the episode on the language, and then when using 3042 in the Volapük episode, and then there's mentioning how "foto" is 42 in Loglan.
- Jabs at Vötgil, one of the first conlangs reviewed, which sat at the bottom of the rankings for 28 episodes.
- Whenever a conlang uses the five vowel system, jan Misali doesn't have anything else to say about it.
- Several excerpts from around the top of Anthony McCarthy's comment thread, starting in episode Fifteen:
  You have got to be about the most superficial commentator on con-langues [sic] since the idiotic B. Gilson.
  I was born in 1998 so I don't know what a radio isinvoked sorry
  yeah but I'm a cute fraud though right?
  toki pono or whatever it is? Give me a break. Show me the bibliography.
- The "What’s the Most Commonly Spoken Language Whose Consonant Inventory Is Incompatible with That of This Particular International Auxiliary Language?" segment, which gets especial attention in the Novial episode.
Self-Deprecation:
- As demonstrated in the page quote, the jabs about the series getting facts wrong extend to its tagline.
- From the Volapük episode:
  jan Misali: people used to say “one” for this in English, but nowadays that’s mostly something one does if one wants to sound more sophisticated than one actually is.
Separated by a Common Language: The phonemic differences between English dialects come up often regarding conlangs based on English, as well as those that define their vowels with examples of English words instead of using the absolute letters of the International Phonetic Alphabet. To highlight the shortcomings of this approach, Misali is quick to demonstrate when General American, Received Pronunciation, and his own dialect pronounce those vowels differently.
Shout-Out:
- Quite a few to Rhythm Heaven, courtesy of jan Misali being a fan of the series. The stinger to Season 3 episodes is set to a rendition of "Dreams of Our Generation" from Rhythm Heaven Fever. The theme song to "What’s the Most Commonly Spoken Language Whose Consonant Inventory Is Incompatible with That of This Particular International Auxiliary Language?" is the theme to Quiz from Rhythm Tengoku.
- The Ido episode includes one to Pannenkoek2012, which is extended with an arrangement of the "File Select" music from Super Mario 64.
Significant Name Overlap: jan Misali finds it difficult to introduce the conlang Iqglic, whose name is pronounced exactly like "English" and was never officially given any way to distinguish the two in spoken speech.
Sitcom Arch-Nemesis:
- VötGil gets treated like this, with jan Misali lovingly(?) cracking jokes at its expense on occasion.
- An Esperantist named Anthony McCarthy started a comment thread questioning Misali's fluency in conlangs, refusing to take Toki Pona for an answer. Misali found this entertaining, and has referenced the thread every so often on the channel through running gags and remixes.
Special Guest: Episode 30, on Sindarin, features Artifexian, a well-known worldbuilding YouTuber. Misali later jokes that Josh from NativLang will have a segment in the video.
Spell My Name with a "The": The first episode opens with "welcome to the Conlang Critic". This was dropped thereafter.
Stylistic Suck: jan Misali calls joke conlang kay(f)bop(t) "the best possible type of bad conlang". Because it's bad on purpose and is worse than Ithkuil is good, it becomes the best artlang by technicality, where it remains until the ranking system is abandoned seventeen episodes later.
Suspiciously Specific Denial: Delivered in Sarcasm Mode, on Novial's reform:
far more consistent than most languages that use the Latin alphabet. I mean, it’s not like it uses the letter as a third, unpredictable way of writing the sound /k/ as a spelling reform proposed six years later or anythOTTO!
why would you do that, Otto? you spent like sixteen hundred words deliberating what the best way to handle the letter would be, and you came to the right conclusion! yeah of course people who like your language aren’t going to want to adapt your spelling reform, it’s not good!
Suspiciously Specific Tense: A similar effect is achieved in the Klingon episode, when jan Misali foreshadows that "we probably won't cover a more famous conlang until either LATE FEBRUARY OR EARLY MARCH 2017".
Take That!: Subverted in the Ygyde episode. Misali clarifies that calling Ygyde "the Linux of conlangs" isn't a potshot at Linux users, but a direct quote from Ygyde's reference grammar.
Verbal Tic: The host of "The Perfect Language [Epic]" says "woo" every so often.
Video Review Show: Of conlangs, naturally. Originally, conlangs were ranked amongst compared to one another, but the show downplayed the "review" aspect at the start of Season 3, instead opting to rate conlangs on an individual basis. As of the High Valyrian episode, it seems this approach is being further downplayed.
jan Misali: it’s nominally a review series, but I don’t think any of the episodes that I’d describe as “good” Conlang Critic videos actually count as reviews. what I think this show should be is one where I look at a conlang and use it as a starting point to talk about different aspects of language design.
Word Salad Philosophy: Some of the reasoning behind The IS Language is treated as such.
jan Misali: this philosophical stuff is extremely far removed from my wheelhouse. while I, conditioned to think of everything dualistically, might think of this as being a separate wheelhouse, my wheelhouse being a subject and this wheelhouse being an object, this is only an illusion, and they are in fact the same wheelhouse, as are all wheelhouses, and everything which is not a wheelhouse. in The IS Language, instead of distinguishing between “in my wheelhouse” and “outside my wheelhouse”, one is encouraged to be conscious of the fact that they are the same thing by... distinguishing between “in my wheelhouse” and “esuohleehw ym ni”.
Xtreme Kool Letterz: Inverted in the Lingua Franca Nova episode. jan Misali compliments the stylistic choice of writing the voiceless velar stop, /k/, with C instead of K.
You Keep Using That Word: jan Misali isn't particularly amused when a conlang renames a part of speech, then proceeds to use that part of speech exactly as it's used in any other language despite the new name. The most notable is the "relationals" of Kelen, which are basically verbs used slightly different than straight-up verbs. He wouldn't have had as much of a problem with this except for Kelen advertising itself as a verbless language.

Web Video / Conlang Critic

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