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
looking at the collaborative conpidgin, Viossa.
I’m going to be doing something pretty different
for this episode, because Viossa is a special
case. I mean, for one, it’s somewhat ambiguous
weather or not it can be called a conlang.
what I usually do is research a conlang until
I know enough about it to develop an informed
opinion, and then talk about it. but for Viossa,
I can’t really do that, so I did something
else instead.
I spoke to several members of the Viossa community
about their experiences with the language,
because one of the most amazing and unique
things about Viossa is the amount of variety
that exists within the language, how much
of it is different from person to person.
so, I decided that the best way to present
this language would be to show it from a bunch
of different perspectives.
SALP: I am Salp. I’m a linguistics student,
I’m also into language learning. I speak
Finnish and English natively. I also speak
Japanese and Spanish. Japanese was my major
contribution language for Viossa, we can get
into what exactly that means in a little bit.
I was basically the most, I guess responsible
for Viossa forming? I was a founding member
and stuff.
PAULI: hi, my name is Pauli, I’m from Finland,
and I’m actually a musician, but I’m conlanging
because I’m into making my own fictional
world, and that got me into conlanging, and
that got me into linguistics.
JANA: I’m Jana, and I have been in the Viossa,
community I suppose, nearly since the beginning,
basically a week after it started.
NIKOMIKO: I’m Nikomiko. I live in Florida,
near Tampa Bay. I’m a saxophonist, I’m
in school for, like, I’ve been back and
forth between music and linguistics for the
past couple years at USF. I came in like a
week into things.
STIBITZKI: my name is Stibitzki. I joined
the Viossa Discord server pretty recently,
like last month, and I’ve already made quite
a lot of progress with the help of the community.
PANCAKE: I am Pancake and I’ve been speaking
Viossa for probably, I think like two, three
months now? I’m a native English speaker,
and I have taken three years of high school
Spanish.
PK OMELETTE: my username is PK Omelette. I
live in Belgium. I study classical languages
and literature, and I speak French, natively.
MISALI: of course, even if I wanted to, I
wouldn’t have been able to make a video
about Viossa by just reading about it, because
by design Viossa is very poorly documented.
the only way to learn Viossa is through immersion,
and, by extension, the only way to learn about
Viossa is directly from its speakers.
so then, what is Viossa?
PAULI: Viossa is a very unique language experiment.
PANCAKE: it’s this collaborative project
that’s been going on for five or six years
at this point.
JANA: the main purpose of it at the beginning
was a collaborative conpidgin, basically trying
to create a pidgin, basically by not speaking
in English.
SALP: and for those of you who are watching
who aren’t familiar, a pidgin is basically
a language that forms via contact between
other languages. and so the experiment was
to see if a pidgin could be formed online
by people speaking different languages, and
trying not to use any shared language, just
to see what would happen, weather we would
establish any kind of understanding.
PAULI: which is kind of emulating circumstances
where different language populations meet
each other and start forming a language because
they need to communicate somehow.
MISALI: I like to call pidgins “nature’s
auxlangs”, because they naturally develop
in this type of situation where an auxiliary
language is necessary.
PK OMELETTE: *laughs* that is quite uh, an
accurate way of calling pidgins.
SALP: and, well, Viossa is the end result
of all that.
NIKOMIKO: so, the result is essentially like
a hybrid language built off of like a dozen
or so, like, main languages that we pulled
vocabulary and syntax from.
STIBITZKI: the basic idea is, if you can make
yourself understood in Viossa, then it is
Viossa. so there’s no set standard for it.
MISALI: how does that begin? like, for like
the first couple of sessions?
PAULI: video calls was the answer to that,
because it’s very easy to visually show
items or actions, maybe even adjectives. but
it didn’t take too long until we were able
to also describe new words with words that
we already knew.
SALP: the project originally started on Christmas
Eve, 2014. it was on a Skype group which sprung
out of the original Con-Skype group as well,
and the original starting group was about
ten people. a lot of the people have dropped
off completely, so it’s a bit of a mystery
who all was involved in the beginning.
MISALI: due to the lack of a single standard
version of Viossa, I can’t do the thing
I always do on Conlang Critic where I make
charts of all the phonemes and read through
them. fortunately, as I was talking to Salp,
she said:
SALP: actually, if you don’t mind, I’m
gonna really quickly just write out what the
phonology is for me.
MISALI: oh, go for it, yeah!
SALP: that’s gonna take like one second,
but I don’t wanna, like, miss anything.
MISALI: yeah, yeah, love that. yeah, go for
it.
SALP: I assume this is gonna be edited out
or whatever.
MISALI: oh yeah, this is- if I don’t edit
parts out of these interviews, this video
is going to be about five hours long.
SALP: do you want me to pronounce my own phonology?
MISALI: *laughs*
SALP: or just list it out? do you want me
to send it to you?
MISALI: I mean, I mean, yeah, post it, and
then we can have th- we can do the thing where
you read it out.
SALP: for my phonology in particular, I use:
/m n ŋ/
/p t k ʔ/
/b d ɡ/
/ts tʃ/
/dz/
/f s ʃ x h/
/v z ʒ/
/w j/
/r/
/l/
I think the most marginal phoneme that I specifically
use is the glottal stop, which I happen to
have in a few words simply because I contributed,
like, a handful of words from Ainu back when
I was studying it for a tiny bit, so I have
the glottal stop phoneme in a few of those
words, and I don’t think anyone else does,
but it’s possible that they also have glottal
stops in some places.
and then there’s /ʒ/, which is actually
a lot more common, but I don’t usually use
it. I sometimes do, but most of the time I
replace it with the affricate. so, I think
that’s the most, I think, notable thing
as well, that I happen to lack something that
most people do have.
JANA: /m/ as in min,
/n/ as in namae,
/ŋ/ as in ring,
/p/ as in per,
/b/ as in bøze,
/t/ as in ting,
/d/ as in dan,
/k/ as in ka,
/ɡ/ as in gammel,
/f/ as in fyyr,
/v/ as in vi,
/θ/ as in thaten,
/s/ as in sama,
/z/ as in san,
/ʃ/ as in pashun,
/dʒ/ as in -djin,
/h/ as in maha,
/r/ as in rø,
/l/ as in lid,
/j/ as in jam,
/w/ as in wasu,
/tʃ/ as in chisai
I guess one of the basic things is I absolutely
have a trill for my rhotic, especially if
it’s at the end of a syllable. I have a
voiceless dental fricative in some places,
although that tends to be pretty rare. a lot
of other people’s varieties of Viossa, for
the words that the loans did have a voiceless
dental fricative, replace it with a /ts/ affricate.
PAULI: there is one thing that I tried to
do at some point, which was that all the /tʃ/
and /dʒ/ consonants would be /θ/ and /ð/
in my idiolect, but it didn’t really catch
on, so I went back. I think I did it mostly
because I like the letters  and .
*laughs*
JANA: I mean, I guess my idiolect, it sticks
somewhat closely to a basic Germanic sounding
phonology, I suppose.
NIKOMIKO: /p b t̪ d̪ t d k ɡ ʔ/
/m n ŋ/
/r/
/ɾ/
/f v s z ʃ ʒ ɕ ʑ ʂ ʐ ç x h/
/j/
/l ɫ/
/ts dz tʃ dʒ/
the way that the experiment is designed, we
all pulled from a particular language to contribute.
and so the idea would be that primarily our
phonology would be based on that language,
like the donation language that we were using.
however, there are a couple of caveats to
that, firstly that, like, we all speak English,
so I think the native speakers of English,
they’re not gonna have the most accurate
presentation in that language.
for instance, I speak English primarily, but
my contribution language was Russian, so my
phonology would be highly, like, Russian influenced,
but also, like, I speak English primarily.
and then because we’re in a setting where
we’re linguistically aware in the first
place, like we know about phonology, we can
just talk about it, we would hear things that
other people would do and adapt them.
but the result is it’s a Russian phonology
filtered through English, and then with little
bits pulled from the phonologies of other
speakers.
SALP: then there’s also the velar fricative.
there’s [x], which I think usually shows
up as an allophone of , but again, it’s
not completely clear-cut. there are some words
where it doesn’t happen, some words where
it can happen. it’s all very fluid.
STIBITZKI: if  precedes a vowel, then I
pronounce it as [h]. if it’s at the end
of a syllable, then I pronounce it as I would
in German, like [χ] if it follows a back
vowel, or [ç] if it follows a front vowel.
JANA: yeah, I honestly can’t even tell if,
like, the glottal fricative is one or two
phonemes. I’m not sure if [x], the velar,
is- is a different phoneme. I don’t think
it is.
SALP: and for vowels, I have:
/i ʉ u/
/e ø o/
/a/
the fact that I have a central high vowel
in there, I’m not defining specifically
what it is because often it is also unrounded,
to some extent, and not necessarily fully
central. so it usually is a mix of something
like a front rounded vowel from Germanic languages
and the Japanese  kina coalescing into
a single thing, contrasting with a more full,
like, [u] sound. that’s also something that
some people never do, some people always do,
and I just don’t bother caring weather I
do it or not.
JANA: and so we have:
/i y/
/e ø/
/æ a/
/ə o/
/u/
and those can all be either long or short.
STIBITZKI: because I speak German, I have
some vowel contrasts that other people don’t
have. “hyske”, I pronounce that with an
[yː], but other people usually say “huske”
with an [uː] sound, and that contrasts for
me with uh, [øː] as in “hööre”.
NIKOMIKO: /i e ø ɛ æ/
/ɪ ʲɪ ʏ/
/ɨ ʉ ə a/
/u o ɔ/
/ˈe ˈa ˈi ˈo ˈu/
/eə̯/
/aː iː/
SALP: in addition to that, there’s also
vowel length and gemination for a lot of speakers,
including myself.
PAULI: it simply means that the length of
a sound has an impact on the meaning of a
word. even people who speak different languages
that have length distinction, they hear length
differences differently.
SALP: some speakers will also turn that into
something like a tense/lax distinction, some
people will turn that into, like, stress or
a pitch accent.
one of the first words to enter the language
had a syllabic esh in it. the word /fʃ.to/
became basically solidified that way for most
speakers immediately, so there was really
no backing out of that. that’s just how
it ended up.
some people might insert, like, an epenthetic
vowel.
PK OMELETTE: I found it hard to pronounce
for me, so I decided to pronounce it /fəʃto/.
it also looks more like Dutch, which I’m
more familiar with.
NIKOMIKO: it started out, as far as I recall,
with the, like, schwa in the beginning, like
/fəʃto/, /ferʃto/, like in the original
languages there was, like, a gap there. but
like, it has never been important what vowel
is there. like, Salp used to say /fuʃtoː/,
/fʉʃtoː/, as though it was from Japanese.
SALP: I did that for a while, and I tried
writing it, but it started to look bad! everybody
else wasn’t doing it, so, you know, I had
to adapt.
NIKOMIKO: I don’t even really know what
I did, but like sometimes you’ll hear like
uh, a rhotic in there almost, like just a
regular old English rhotic, like /fɚʃto/.
MISALI: *laughs*
NIKOMIKO: which I think is just, amusing.
SALP: as far as like, general phonotactics
go, it is kind of unlimited, because it’s
all determined by what the donor languages
happen to provide, and what the people decide
to accept.
JANA: it is very loose, but somehow works.
PANCAKE: the differences in the phonology
between each person, but there’s also the
differences in orthography of those same words.
and so sometimes, for me I would read two
people talking, and they would respond to
each other with what looked like different
words, but as I found out later once I became
a little bit more fluent, it was just a spelling
difference.
PAULI: well, of course, probably everybody
tries to spell the way they pronounce.
STIBITZKI: I don’t really have a set orthography.
usually I just use whatever spelling I learned
first. that leads to lots of inconsistencies
in my spelling.
SALP: as I notice distinctions, I try and
write them for some time, then if I realize
that it’s just not working for me, I’ll
discard it.
PK OMELETTE: it was created by people gathering
together and speaking orally to each other,
so it was developed by speech, and it was
not written on the page or set on the rock,
or any way.
JANA: the actual name of the language, Viossa,
most people spell that , but I spell
it .
PAULI: I do write the way I pronounce, and
it’s also inspired by Finnish spelling in
that length distinction is always a double
letter, just like in Finnish.
PANCAKE: some of the ways I’ve seen it done:
you can either double the base vowel, you
can use an acute accent, or the overline like
Latin will do, or just, some people don’t
write them at all. some people don’t have
long vowels. I have a written long vowel distinction
but not a spoken one, for example.
SALP: some people use particular digraphs,
others will use diacritics. I don’t use
diacritics.
PK OMELETTE: for one word, for example, I
wrote it like that, with a macron, and I think
I saw the same word with a .
JANA: for the vowel /ø/, I tend to use the
slash, and for /æ/, I tend to use  with
umlaut, for, I guess, consistency somewhat.
wait, that’s not consistent.
MISALI: *laughs* right, *laughs*
JANA: either way.
most people have a language that they loan
words into Viossa from. so, mine were Old
English, and later also Gothic.
PAULI: I also supplied some words from Swedish,
which I know a bit of also, and Northern Sami,
which I don’t know.
SALP: I have been using Japanese in Viossa
since the beginning.
NIKOMIKO: my contribution languages, actually
I had two. it was Russian and Old Norse, like
I just had an Old Norse book for a little
while.
SALP: I’d say the most influence comes from
Japanese, Russian, Norwegian, Finnish, Albanian,
Greek, Swiss German,
JANA: Finnish, Albanian, Greek, Japanese,
a lot of Japanese, a lot of Norwegian, Swiss
German, Old English, Gothic, Russian,
SALP: that’s basically the major set of
languages. some of those people are not even
active at this point anymore though, so the
language continues to evolve in very different
directions as time goes on.
PAULI: when you’re trying to teach a word
to everybody else, and you have the accurate
idea of the meaning of the word, and then
the other people, they get it slightly wrong,
but then they say that they got it, so you
think they got it. one specific example of,
like, a word changing meaning is, I tried
to introduce the word, the adjective “bright”.
so I took a light, and I just shone it towards
the camera. it’s bright, of course, but
everybody took it to mean “light”! *laughs*
PANCAKE: I’ll come across a word and recognize
it, and I’m like, “okay, I know what this
is”, but it’s not always that simple,
because just like any other language that
exists for any significant amount of time,
there’s semantic drift and differences in
its uses, et cetera.
SALP: if you stop speaking Viossa for a year
or so, you may return to find that basic things
that you thought you understood are gone,
and you have to scramble to understand things
again.
PK OMELETTE: I found that abbreviated words
were sometimes abbreviated in the same way
Japanese would, take a syllable from the first
part, and then a syllable from the second
part, and then just make a word that’s the
first syllable of each part.
JANA: at the beginning, I was very hesitant
to shorten words. but eventually, I gave in,
and now I shorten words all the time! one
of the big examples of that is “pashun”,
which I shorten to “pash” sometimes.
SALP: “kotoba”, because it’s such a
common word, and it’s very big, people have
a tendency to shorten it to either “koto”
or simply “ko”. and this tends to happen
even more so in compounding, because compound
words in Viossa get very massive when you
have a small selection of vocab to draw from.
so, one of the most common words that we use,
“kotobalibre”, when people wanna talk
about their own personal dictionaries, tend
to shorten it to “kotoli”, because why
not? there’s also examples of words that
have preserved their older form in a compound
that in other situations people just use an
abbreviated version or whatever, so. basically,
things fossilize here and there, other things
shift. it is very unsystematic, and I think
that describes the whole spirit of the project
pretty well.
JANA: another word with an interesting history,
the word, in my idiolect it’s “verje”.
other people pronounce it “farge”, some
other people pronounce it “farje”, some
more other people pronounce it “varge”,
so you can see where I’m going with this.
it has, like, a bunch of different realizations
depending on who you’re talking to, and
my variant is “verje”. it wasn’t, like,
purposeful at all, like that’s just how
I heard the word.
SALP: I think vocab nowadays tends to rely
more on derivations rather than borrowing,
for two reasons. first of all, it’s easier
to remember. you know, if you haven’t seen
a word before but it’s based on parts that
you already recognize, you’ll keep it in
mind a lot easier. and the second one was
literally just that it’s better than, you
know, relying on something Latinate if we
have to refer to anything more complex. you
would rather have it be more purely Viossa,
if possible.
JANA: no English, and on that, Latinate words
were and still are disencouraged.
SALP: the convenient thing about using Japanese
as a contribution language is that when everybody
else has something Latinate, because everybody
else is using European languages, I’ll often
be the one who comes in and is like, “okay,
we’re using something to make it less Englishy”.
because of that, Japanese has often been like
the fallback, which is why there’s so much
of it!
PAULI: there was a moment when I realized
that this moment is when we can start using
Viossa to describe Viossa. it was like, just
a few weeks after the project started, and
we were able to start, like, defining words,
explaining words, explaining grammar with
Viossa itself. so that reduced the need for
video calls, like, almost completely.
NIKOMIKO: overall, I would describe Viossa
as very isolating. there aren’t a lot of,
or really any forms that I can think of where
it goes beyond reduction when you combine
morphemes. it hasn’t progressed to the point
where these forms, like, merge into something
totally new. it’s just like, lots of combination
happens.
PANCAKE: Viossa, which doesn’t have much
overt marking for much of anything, was a
really weird experience, because the word
order is still incredibly free in a sense.
there’ll be some times where I’m speaking
in a very English manner, with like, very
subject-verb-object, always every time. other
days, I’ll do strange things where I have,
like, verbs in like three different orders
depending on the sentence.
SALP: the grammar of Viossa resembles a lot
of pidgins in that it is quite isolating.
it’s quite non-configurational as well,
so there’s not a lot of rigid rules, and
a lot of that is because we have not established
rigid rules. ever. *laughs* by writing them
out and being like “this is the rule, you
have to follow it”. people of course have
many variations in their grammar, but in general,
it’s very isolating. we tend to rely more
on particles and adpositions and things like
that rather than, you know, complex cases
or verb conjugations and things like that.
PK OMELETTE: even though I live in Belgium
and not in France, I still speak French, which
means there is one authority for French, l’Académie
Française. they have a strong influence on
how people see new ways of saying things.
I came into Viossa, immediately you see the
first rule, “if you are understood, it’s
correct Viossa”. and that immediately changes
everything about how you treat the language
itself. and that was a really important lesson
for me, and also just almost liberating.
PANCAKE: not having to, like, study a grammar
and know exactly every rule was kind of freeing
in a sense, I would say.
SALP: the goal is more comprehension. if you
can put words together in an order and somebody
understands it, it’s probably correct.
JANA: another thing is that there is no copula.
other people might use a copula for clarification
purposes, but I personally just, no copula.
one of the very early rules was “no copula”.
MISALI: *laughs*
JANA: it seems like that has become less cared
about, although it is still a overriding tendency
for speakers of the language to not use a
copula. but at the beginning, copulas were
forbidden in the language.
MISALI: that seems so counter to like, the
spirit of how-
JANA: alongside, it was no copula, and alongside
that, no English loans. those two rules were
like, right next to each other.
MISALI: but! if you loan “is”, then that
cancels out.
JANA: true.
STIBITZKI: because everyone knew English,
everyone had English to fall back on, so even
if they provided a non-Indo-European language,
it’s just kinda how it came out.
JANA: in Viossa, there really isn’t much
of a tense system. there are particles that
convey time though. they started out as words,
and they still are used as words in some places,
but they’ve largely become sorta particles
that convey either pastness or futureness
or presentness.
NIKOMIKO: uh, Viossa has prepositions, it
has a lot of prepositions, and has also postpositions
that aren’t always used that way, not everybody
uses them as postpositions.
SALP: one of the features that Viossa has
that I haven’t really encountered in any
natlang before is the opposition between the
adpositions (I’m using ambiguous terminology
for a reason here) “de” and “za”.
so, the way we always explain these is by
putting them between numbers. “ein de ni
de tre”, “tre za ni za ein”. that should
be mostly self explanatory, but the thing
with that is, it shows a very specific use
case. you’re not usually listing events
purely like that. usually you wanna use words
like this at the beginning of a sentence,
or before a subclause, or all sorts of situations
which do not clearly lend themselves towards
such a listing. so for about five years now,
people have not known how to use these words.
people use this words, and kind of understand
what the other person is saying sometimes,
but there’s a lot of disagreement. so this
has led to the word “deza” to mean “something
that is just such a mess that nobody has any
idea how to use it”.
MISALI: the following is a section of a conversation
between Salp and Nikomiko, which they kindly
recorded specifically so I could use it as
the Viossa sample in this video. now, I will
note that up until this point I’ve been
avoiding direct translations, which is because
if anyone watching this video decides that
they want to actually learn Viossa, direct
translations can be considered “spoilers”.
however, this sample section will in fact
be translated, so if you want to avoid spoilers,
skip to the time code on screen.
N: akkurat akkurat, mange...
apar
aparchigau hanasutropos, lik
mange [ef], mange [eɸ]
auauauau
S: mange ef? ka?
un nai
un nai fshto
N: [fa afa ɸa aɸa]
S: a
N: lik
S: pravda
N: akkurat
S: [fa ɸa]
N: akku, akkurat, lik--
lik koske un hanu
“afto” [aɸto]
S: [aɸtoː aɸtoː]
N: apartid
“afto” apartid lik uten
uten, uten...
S: fshto
N: ka, ka--
S: afto pravda, un mietta ka ine hadji fu...
fu andra
fu andra mitzan
bli lik [ɸ] os yokulik
[aɸtoː]
N: akkurat
S: “fshto”
N: “aftrukyen”
S: lik nai hel...
“[f]shto”
N: mhm, “fshto”, “fshto”--
mm, “fshto”
“fshto” un bruk--
un bruk der
ka kotoba? ka ishi ine-
ine kuchi
S: ka ishi ine kuchi?
a, hammas
N: “hammas”, akkurat
S: hel chigau, men
fshto fshto
N: akkurat
S: “ishi ine kuchi”
N: “ishi ine”--
men, du hanu dan afto per un!
per mahklar
S: hanu dan? deki
N: men, deki ka nai du
deki ka Klaus, men
S: nai shiru li Klaus shiru afto kotoba
“hammas”
men
N: nai shiru awen
S: ishilik ting
N: akkurat
akkurat, ishilik ting
S: men, li glug mange...
mange..
søt... ishke?
nai har mirai ishilik hammas
har mirai...
har mirai mange fuwafuwa hammas
N: akkurat
trist
S: nai mange bra
N: nai mange bra
un har afto problem apar
S: aa, trist
du mus, du mus...
“hammasdusha”
ka kotoba?
N: “hammasdusha”, akkurat
S: “hammassodji”
“hammassodji” plusbra mietta
N: “hammassodji”, akkurat, au
au un suru, un s--
un lera
koske un netopadusha, un awen
hammasnuito suru
S: akkurat, sama
mange bra grun nai--
nai mus...
trist li vonarø shkoi alplas made
N: akkurat, akkurat. awen
lik, koske un hammasnuito suru
lik
shtof
shkoi ekso
du shiru, ekso kuchi
S: fshto
N: au ine alplas, koske lik
ander--
ander pashun sodji ting? lik
gomen, un nai vil dan, men tull--
men slucha dan, de
nai har afto problem ine dusha
S: pravda
sodji netopa mange haste apardag
afto slucha
men
bra ka vi har
simpel fu
fu imadag vona
au har mange ishke
ine dusharum
ka deki
N: ak
S: fiks alting per vi
N: akkurat
akkurat mange bra
S: mange bra
bra--bra hanutid dan
SALP: Viossa is quite an unusual conlang project,
in that it wasn’t intended as a conlang,
it was intended as an experiment, and it formed
mostly naturally, in that not much of it was
consciously put together. obviously, there
are some things that had a lot of conscious
influence, because it was mostly conlangers
with linguistics knowledge, but the majority
of it was just what people put together. as
an experiment, it was flawed. everybody who
was participating spoke English, and also
had certain languages in common, even if they
weren’t using them.
NIKOMIKO: honestly, I think the absence of
monolinguals who don’t speak English, I
think that’s one thing that, like, it’s
not something that I despise about the language
or anything, it’s just an unfortunate side
effect of the way it was put together. like,
I feel like the experience would be, like,
so much more of a diverse, like, cultural
exchange if we were able to do that. unfortunately,
I think it was just out of scope for the project,
really.
PANCAKE: it’s kind of hard sometimes to
know how much is cheating, because they say,
like, “no English” is one of the big rules
of Viossa, and yet will use like, images and
emojis all the time. is that cheating?
JANA: I know nowadays it’s kinda frowned
upon to use emojis or like, pictures of objects
to find out what something means, but I honestly
*laughs* I honestly don’t really care! *laughs*
go ahead!
NIKOMIKO: I find that like, even in circumstances
where *laughs* I figured out a word through
“nefarious means”, *laughs* there’s
always something new to learn and figure out
how to express. as long as you just continue
applying the ethical rules, like if you strive
not to correct people when the distinction
isn’t important, for instance, then you
have the possibility to completely relearn
that word that you cheated to figure out.
SALP: beyond that though, as a conlang, well,
it’s not a very interesting conlang.
STIBITZKI: the grammar is pretty Indo-European,
so that’s kind of boring.
PAULI: even though we’re speaking with all
these words from all these different languages,
we tended to use English syntax a lot, because
syntax is not an equally obvious part of language,
even though it’s, of course, equal importance.
SALP: honestly, like, if somebody just sent
me a random grammar of this and said it was
their conlang, I would probably be absolutely
disgusted, and
MISALI: *laughs*
SALP: not have any interest whatsoever, but
that wasn’t Viossa’s goal, so that’s
our excuse.
PK OMELETTE: I don’t think two speakers
of Viossa would write all words exactly the
same way at all.
JANA: it’s like, a language that is being
used with a community that is very close knit,
and we all know each other for a long time.
I think that’s honestly one of the big keys
to the, Viossa’s success, is that we’re
a group of friends that all liked linguistics.
NIKOMIKO: god, I love the community. honestly,
just the closeness of things. because everybody
has relearned how to speak with each other,
and in such an intimate, and kind of like,
loving way.
STIBITZKI: you know those other people, you’re
friendly with them, and you have your own
secret language with them.
SALP: I’ve been using it for five years,
I’ve made friends within the project that
I wouldn’t’ve met otherwise, it just is
very cool to have seen the experiment unfold
and having that experience of trying to struggle
to communicate and establishing language.
it’s not something that really a lot of
people experience in their lifetimes.
PAULI: the main way of learning the language
is immersion, which is something that you
almost never get with any other language.
PANCAKE: I just think it’s really cool,
and I’m in a sense kind of thankful that
I’m part of the community, I suppose, but
I’m also glad that I’ve been able to share
it with everyone, in a way.
MISALI: you know what I love?
NIKOMIKO: hm?
MISALI: this is the seventh of these interviews
I’ve done.
NIKOMIKO: uh-huh.
MISALI: so far, one hundred percent of people
have said that they love the Viossa community.
NIKOMIKO: *laughs* aw! yeah, yeah... *laughs*
MISALI: it is so wonderful and wholesome hearing
people talk about how they’ve made friends
over the course of learning this language,
and every single person I’ve talked to about
Viossa has said that!
NIKOMIKO: that’s so fun. I love that. that
warms my heart to hear so much, because like,
since I’ve been around so long, it pleases
me so deeply to know that, like, the new people
and older speakers as well, we’ve been able
to continue having that experience with each
other, and I think that’s really fabulous.
JANA: I remember, *laughs* I remember we were
at these cliffs over the ocean, and we’re
just like, hanging out. so we start, like,
talking in Viossa, for fun. we see a lizard,
and I think one of us is like, “I wonder
what the Viossa word for this should be”,
or something like that. so, I’m like, “I’m
gonna come up with one!” and so I whipped
out my phone *laughs* and I search up, like,
an Old English translation for it, and so
I was like, “oh,” *laughs* “this is
an āðexe!” and so now the word for lizard
is “aathekse” because we were hanging
out one day and saw a lizard and didn’t
have a word for it already *laughs* so, it’s
now an “aathekse”.
MISALI: all in all, I am so grateful that
I got the opportunity to talk to the Viossa
community. that said, I don’t really know
if I have any real opinions on the language
itself. talking about what I like or don’t
like about its design and its aesthetic feels
like it would just be missing the point, you
know?
the fact that Viossa exists is a direct side
effect of my absolute favorite trait of humanity:
the innate desire to communicate with one
another. Viossa reminded me why I love linguistics.
thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next
time, where I’ll be reviewing Iqglic.
o tawa waso
lon sewi laso!
o pilin e suno!
tenpo kama la
mi lon wile pi
kulupu jan tenpo
