Freshly coined
A word awaits.
Part of speech undetermined. Meaning withheld pending further study.
Voice & playback
Your browser reads the spelling. The pronunciation guide records the generator’s intended sounds; the two may disagree. Available voices depend on your browser and device.
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The wide world of Unglish
You can often pronounce an English word before you know what it means. You can sometimes get several years' use out of it before anybody notices.
We all accept English as a gibberish language, collectively made up in real time across the globe. It's functional. It's cultural. It's an ungodly mishmash of borrowed words and sounds. It makes no sense, but it gets the job done.
Some folks, like the OED1, attempt to maintain control and impose order. It's a futile resistance.
Unglish seeks to bring the insanity of English to its natural conclusion: infinite gibberish, self-replicating and in dynamic equilibrium. All while sounding kind of English when you squint your ears.
1 Obstruent Etymology Dictators. ↩
Editions
The generator keeps developing. Each edition keeps the rules it started with.
| Edition | Issued | Particulars |
|---|---|---|
| Unglish a |
Words with their own melodies. Four names, four chains, one generator: arbiglish, baglish, optiglish and zorglish. [baglish still minting!] |
|
| Unglish 0 | The first released generator, using a naive approach. An edition of 20, each generating words indefinitely. View on Teia. |
|
| Unglish 0-rc1 | An early preview, looped on the main stage at the Causal Islands conference closing party. |
Sale status as checked on .
An ongoing experiment
Unglish generates words from sounds and rules that resemble English. The spelling and pronunciation arrive together; what you make of them is your affair.
The word generator [new!] is the current workbench. Its code is open, and development updates live in the associated repository.
Who is authorised to produce Unglish words?
Only me and you.
What is the ambition?
To build many worlds of impossible to understand gibberish, each with a graceful internal coherence. Poetry and prose. Conversations and disagreements. Idle thoughts and musings.
But, if we do it right, its true meaning will be impregnababble.
What versioning system do you use?
Unglish is versioned in base IDGAF. We started with a, then cycle through e, i, o and u. After that we loop back to a and add b, the lowest-indexed English consonant, to get ab.
At some point we’ll add spaces and punctuation. If we iterate high enough, we may eventually have written a novel.
What’s the programme of work?
I’ll be as brief and vague as I can. The present state is shown obliquely.
- Words → definitions → grammar → writing.
- English phonemes, in IPA → other phonetic systems → all phonemes.
- The browser’s speech synthesis → SSML? → custom voices?
Presently we are optimising for TTFP. All told, the whole project should take 50 years, give or take a century.
Kindred spirits
Projects and movements presently egging this effort on: