Kay(f)bop(t)

Kay(f)dan(f)san(t)ap(t)vlir(t)sang(b)es(p)u(t)vom(b)ngag(t)vlim(p)kay(f)sna(f)kay(f)ga(f) Bop(t)veg(p)daf(f)shof(b)*om(p)vlim(p)ga(f)vlim(p)ga(f), or kay(f)bop(t) is a funlang created by Daniel Swanson in 2015 on his WordPress blog CrazyNinjaGeeks. The full name means "limited, expected, inedible, undying, epic language worth less than $10, which is far less (or more) useful than the average usefulness of things in this category". The conlang incorporates several impractical features from the Bad Conlanging Ideas Tumblr Blog, plus some original impractical features. This conlang was covered by Mitch Halley (jan Misali) in a YouTube video in 2016, as part of his ongoing series "Conlang Critic".

Phonology

Consonants

The 25 consonants are:

	Labial	Dental	Alveolar	Lateral		Palatal	Velar	Glottal	Manual
Nasal	m		n				ng /ŋ/
Stop	b		d				g /ɡ/
	p		t				k or c (or ch?) /k/	ʔ
Click				! /ǁ/ (left click)	* /ǁ/ (right click)
Clack									% (clap)
									@ (facepalm)
Fricative	v		z			zh (or j) /ʒ/
	f (or ph) /f/	th /θ/	s (or c?) /s/			sh (or ch?) /ʃ/
Approximant	w		r /ɹ/	l		y /j/	(w)

Vowels

	Front		Back
Close	i or ɪ /i~ɪ/		u or ʌ /u~ʊ~ʌ/
Close-mid	e /e~ɛ/	ø	o /o~ɔ~ɑ/
Open	a /æ~a~e~ɑ~ɒ/

Phonemic Hats

If you were to actually attempt to speak this language, you will need to rapidly swap between these four hats for pretty much every syllable.

Grapheme	Hatonym
(f)	Fedora
(t)	Top hat
(b)	Baseball cap
(p)	Pangolin hat (or turkey hat)

Vocabulary

The ʔ, ø, and ɪ characters are rare and only used in words like ø(p) (meaning "null") and zɪg(f)ʔʌ(f)zɪg(t)ʔa(f) (meaning "a type of lover who works hard to fit in with your life, because they love you so much and are willing to put in effort to make your relationship work").

In the Conlang Critic video, jan Misali used Han characters (陛, 酶, 瑟) in place of the aforementioned characters, which turned out to be a text-encoding error on Misali's part, and effectively gaslit Daniel Swanson for four years into thinking he had added the Han characters into his language, as revealed in a video by LingoLizard. Swanson believes that Misali also mislabeled the "bimanual" and "faciomanual" consonants as a stop and click, respectively, because a stop implies an air flow, and that a click implies a vacuum.

Grammar

Simple Kay(f)bop(t) words are usually really long and it's mainly because the suffix system. It's kind of like Ithkuil, except it's mandatory, and simultaneously more specific and less precise.

Nouns have to be conjugated by case, number, expectation, edibility, grammatical gender, manner of death, awesomeness, and market value. Verbs have to be conjugated by number, expectation, mental state, day of the week, honesty and subject magnitude relative to that of a breadbox, awesomeness, and certainty. These aren't optional. Every noun ends with 9 suffixes and every verb ends with 7 suffixes.

Vocabulary

You might think Kay(f)bop(t) goes for maximum precision, but then you look at the vocabulary; a Kay(f)bop(t) root can have up to and including 18 distinct, unrelated meanings. For an example, the root "bes(b)baf(t)let(p)gob(b)-" can mean: hatter, terminology, journalese, grasslike, unrevenged, alphabetization, misty, heal, althea, detain, edict, rehash, guzzler, thalassemia, ergot, humilia, raceabout, and epanchement. This combined with the suffix system basically means interpreting a Kay(f)bop(t) word is kind of like a game of Twenty Questions, right down to the "animal / vegetable / mineral" type noun classes and the conjugation based on size relative to a breadbox. Just like in Twenty Questions, this still might not be enough information in some cases, to the extent that some entire chunks of text can mean multiple, distinct, equally valid things, with no way to know which one it is other than context.

There is a 40-minute video available where Swanson reads what he claims to be a translation of the Babel story from the Bible, but because of the ambiguity of roots in the Kay(f)bop(t) language, it also can be equally interpreted as a translation of the Rick Astley song "Never Gonna Give You Up".

Conclusion

Kay(f)bop(t) set out to be a bad conlang. In the original YouTube video, jan Misali said he thinks that it's the best kind of bad; so bad it's good, basically.