One would be hard-pressed to find a language more beset by crankery than Aklo. For over two hundred years it has been the cornerstone of an entire subgenre of bullshit, and the forecast shows no signs of letting up. TikTok, YouTube and Instagram are flooded with claims that it:
- Is the original human language
- Confirms hard Sapir-Worf
- Contains no word for love
- Grants its speakers magical powers
- Was inherited from aliens
- Was inherited from angels
- Was inherited from demons
- Was inherited from neanderthals
- Is a memetic virus from space
- Is Proto-Indo-European
- Is Proto-Dene-Yeneseian
- Is Proto-Nostratic
- Is Proto-Dene-Sinitic-Caucasian
- Was spoken by dwarflike pre-Celtic inhabitants of Europe
- Was spoken by pre-Christian witch-cults
- Was spoken in Atlantis and / or Lemuria and / or Mu
- Was spoken prior to the Tower of Babel
- Was invented by the Soviet Union in order to destabilize the United States
- Was invented by the Nazis in order to speak to esoteric Hyperborean intelligences
- Was invented by the child-eating secret societies of the English aristocratic elite
- Was invented by the United States in order to destabilize the Soviet Union
- Was invented by Yakub so white people could conspire in secret
- Was invented by linguists to perpetuate the hoax of Proto-Indo-European
- Was invented by John Dee
- Was invented by Noam Chomsky
- Was invented by the Freemasons
- Was invented by the Jesuits
- Was invented by medieval kabbalists
- Was invented by the United Nations
- Has grammatical features found in no natural human language
- Has no numbers
- Doesn’t permit recursion
- Violates linguistic universals
- Isn’t truly pronounceable by humans
- Is completely without phonemic vowels
- Is the original language of the Necronomicon
- Is the language of the Voynich Manuscript
- Is instinctively understood by children deprived of language
- Can only be properly translated by AI
- Is an AI-generated hoax
- Was spoken by at least two of the 9/11 hijackers
- Is actually bastardized Sanskrit
- Is actually bastardized Hungarian
- Is actually bastardized Basque
- Is the only oligosynthetic natural language
- Features no grammatical or semantic ambiguity
- Can be translated into any language with no loss of meaning
- Was spoken by God to create the universe
- Contains a word that will end the world if read aloud
- Is an elaborate worldbuilding project that got out of hand.
Cursory review of even moderately-reliable sources indicates few to none of these claims has even minimal backing in mainstream linguistics.
This is actually the preface to a more in-depth post about Aklo, but since the list got finished first i put it up early.
ReplyDeleteOne of my favourite DG extras (DLC?) is the tome The Hudson Book, which touches on Aklo.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.delta-green.com/the-hudson-book/
And the general theme of the conspiracy theories you posted here reminds me of GURPS Horror The Madness Dossier setting, where human language is secretly a weapon of dead-but-dreaming alien gods that enslaved us in ancient times.
51. All of the above.
ReplyDeleteIn This House We Believe:
ReplyDeleteAklo grants its speakers magical powers.
Aklo was inherited from aliens.
Aklo is a memetic virus from space.
Aklo was spoken by dwarflike pre-Celtic inhabitants of Europe.
Aklo has grammatical features found in no natural human language.
Aklo has no numbers.