Conlang Critic: Drsk

you probably thought the Artifexian collab was my big video this month, huh?

A Case Against the Character:

[stationshelter]

oof this poor guy personally sent you a whole reference grammar so you could make a video savagely dunking on his whole scene
what a world we live in

[PurpleCoin]

The person who made Drsk has really nice handwriting.

[qui]

jan Misali when Artifexian chooses dozenal: yes of course its fine (but lets use something else)
jan Misali when Drsk uses dozenal: DISGUSTANG

[ryanraj]

Conlang Critic you should make your own conlang and showcase it

[epiceric]

Don't worry, we know that the real reason why you didn't like this language is because it uses base-12.

[tonyhakston]

“This doesn’t have [insert linguistic feature here], except it actually has exactly that feature, ” the language.

[Nerdule]

Oh man, I recognize this guy! Isoraq used to hang out on the MSPA forums and talk about his worldbuilding stuff. Cool to see him again! I kind of missed this funky little weirdo and his extremely specific special interests and deeply quirky style.

[AkhierDragonheart]

"A Case Against the Character" is an interesting read. I can see some of what he is trying to say except I reject his notion of Worldstate Literature not having a main character. The difference is that instead of focusing on a person it focuses on the world as a whole or some subsection of it. The main character or rather the subject of a story is simply what the author has chosen to focus on. The reason why most stories focus on an individual is not because other forms of story aren't worth exploring but rather that is what we are, individuals. What I get the most from reading his case though is that he might be on the autism spectrum (or some similar thing) as some of it jives with what I have personally experienced in the past. This is especially true during the part about how character parameters are time dependent. He specifically writes
"Now the problem is that while most of the time "interaction" can be approximated by simple collisions and altering of parameters, I have been informed that with characters, this is not the case. This is frustrating, because now I have to work extra hard to understand the work, which is of course not very conducive to making enjoyment, especially when the individual character instance is not making it easy."
This feeling of not being able to understand how the character is developing and others just saying that it happens hits home quite hard. With something like Autism it is like everyone got a rulebook to life but your own has some pages ripped out of it. People just understand how to interact and why certain interactions cause certain things. This is very frustrating when you just don't have that innate knowledge. Of course I will state that is all speculation based on personal experience and is at best guesses with no grounding in actual facts beyond my having read the case. You don't have to 'have' something to get lost in human interaction and I was just comparing the feeling he described to my own personal experience.

[parmaxolotl]

I'm morbidly curious how you would tear my language apart

[qwertyTRiG]

Hmm. Have you heard of "role shift" in sign languages? That seems to be what Drsk is going for with its "totally not the first person" pronoun. When telling a story in most (all?) sign languages, you can shift role to inhabit a character; pronouns (indexing) shift with you.

[samneibauer]

It's like a child's dream got beaten up by Georgians

[Gilboron]

The arguments raised with regards to character-driven stories baffle me for two reasons. Firstly, what struck me as the most obvious argument against character-driven stories seemingly wasn't even mentioned; namely that it usually ties in to "great man theory", the idea that change comes about solely due to the bespoke choices of specific individuals, which a lot of people have been critical of for various reasons. Secondly, the idea that there is no market for setting-driven stories is absurd - maybe it's not as big as character-driven stories, but books like Last and First Men are driven entirely by large-scale worldbuilding with little regard for individual characters.

[Zenith]

hello mr critic i wanna say that i didnt know what a conlang is or anything about linguistics but i like this series a lot
idek how i found you but thanks

[russellemerine]

On languages not having vowels: The (natural) Salishan languages in northwestern USA have "phonemic vowels, " but these vowels morphologically alternate with their respective consonants, a:ʔ, i:y, and u:w. They also have plenty of words without vowels, such as Nuxalk's famed xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ. A friend of mine has actually done field research in Kwak'wala, and he supports/quite likes the no vowel analysis.

[mehrheitler]

Dunno man, I liked this one. The guy tries to make something interesting.

[mellogy]

I totally understand the issues with this, but I still love this language! It's really unique and sounds super cool when spoken.

[EmulationofAwesome]

They basically have a pronoun for OP, which might as well be a pronoun.

[Sylocat]

12:56

I don't quite understand his argument as to why the changes in characters over time is supposed to be harder to keep track of than the changes in places and societies over time.

[ceasarrex]

I don't have a favorite conlang so you can't get facts wrong about my favorite conlang.

[a]

I can see everything wrong with it, and yet I can't help but love it. I almost want to go learn it, except for how difficult that would be.