Hello, I have a proposal for a brand-new language that will someday be spoken by over a hundred million people.
Okay, interesting. What is it like?
First, the sounds will be super simple. Nothing wild. And to match that, we’ll have a consistent phonetic script where spelling almost always matches pronunciation.
That’s actually fantastic.
It’s so fantastic that we’ll make two of them.
Wait. Why?
Because one will be for normal words, and the other will be for spicy foreign loan words and dramatic flair, kinda like comic sans or curlz. And some of the characters will look almost exactly the same, so you’ll constantly second-guess which is which. A delightful daily brain teaser.
Uhh…that sounds… manageable. Two syllabaries. Fine.
Oh no, we just got started. There’s also an entire separate writing system consisting of complicated characters, many of which look like someone sneezed out geometry homework.
How many are we talking about? 50? 100?
Thousands.
Thousands?!
Yes. And you’ll need about two thousand just to read a newspaper without crying. Tens of thousands exist, and occasionally the language will throw one of those at you just to keep you humble.
At least they’re consistent, right? Like in Mandarin?
Hilarious. No. A single character can have seventeen different readings depending on context, history, and what mood the sentence is in that day. Also, most words sound exactly the same because we only gave ourselves a limited range of syllables to work with. Good luck.
…How is grammar?
Fun and exciting! Pronouns: dozens. “I” can be polite, rude, masculine, feminine, cutesy, tough-guy, elderly-man energy, edgy, archaic, or mysterious-anime-protagonist mode. Also, subjects drop out of sentences constantly, so you must mentally track every implied reference like a CIA agent trapped in a linguistic escape room.
This is becoming upsetting.
We’re not finished. There’s an entire social hierarchy embedded in every verb. You must constantly signal who outranks whom, who is humbling himself, and whether you are sufficiently groveling before the boss. Speaking to a CEO requires time-traveling your grammar to the 1600s and sprinkling in vocabulary that has not been used casually since samurai payroll meetings.
Please stop.
Almost forgot: counting things requires different number words depending on whether the object is long, flat, small, big, alive, dead, or spiritually ambiguous.
I said stop.
But think of the payoff: you can write poetry in three scripts at once while politely apologizing to your boss for only working 90 hours last week! Or you can finally understand those super specific Japanese references in Gintama!
Security, get this psycho out!
by MastaBlasta725