
John Quijada and Ithkuil, the Language He Invented - ph0rque
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/12/24/121224fa_fact_foer?currentPage=all
======
cscurmudgeon
Classical Sanskrit was designed with this exact goal in mind.

[http://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/46...](http://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/466)

There are still native speakers of Sanskrit. The cool thing about Sanskrit is
that not only is its syntax formalized, but people have tried to give an
account of its semantics over thousands of years.

~~~
anuraj
There are no native speakers of Sanskrit - some people have tried to revive
Sanskrit by speaking it - sometimes in large groups. Usage of Sanskrit as a
day to day language probably ended hundreds if not thousands of years ago.
There are still books written in the language and quiet a number of people can
understand it. It is a matter of debate if Sanskrit was any time used as a
primary language for communication.

~~~
cscurmudgeon
_It is a matter of debate if Sanskrit was any time used as a primary language
for communication._

It is not a matter of debate as there are speakers even today. Declining
definitely, but still significant.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit#Contemporary_usage>

 _The 1991 and 2001, census of India recorded 49,736 and 14,135 persons,
respectively, with Sanskrit as their native language.[1]_

~~~
anuraj
Yes - but native language in census terms do not mean mother tongue. There are
few villages in India which adopted Sanskrit as first tongue - That is an
experiment not akin to being part of a continuity. At the most, you can say
these native speakers revived a dead language.

~~~
cscurmudgeon
I know this is a very sensitive topic given the language chauvinism that is
prevalent in India. There are at least two villages which speak Sanskrit (just
Google it). It was definitely the case that there were more speakers of
Sanskrit (Vedic+Classical) and people who have Sanskrit as their mother
tongue. People sort of resort to gymnastics to deny the obvious. As long as
there are people speaking a language natively and people genuinely interested
in it, I don't think you can call that language dead. But I agree, Sanskrit
speakers are on the decline and it is a bad thing.

[http://www.mangalorean.com/news.php?newstype=broadcast&b...](http://www.mangalorean.com/news.php?newstype=broadcast&broadcastid=37847)

 _But surprisingly, today in Mangalore, there is one unique family where all
the members are using Sanskrit as their mother tongue and they all interact
with each other in this language only. Seems highly improbable but
nevertheless, it is true._

I think one reason for the decline is that you need to be pretty intelligent
to learn Sanskrit (vs say Tamil or English). I sort of feel that the human
race itself was more smart a few thousand years ago. (See
[http://rt.com/usa/news/intelligence-stanford-years-
fragile-5...](http://rt.com/usa/news/intelligence-stanford-years-
fragile-531/))

~~~
anuraj
I can pretty well understand Sanskrit and have learned it for 10 years. It is
definitely not difficult to learn. 'Sanskrit' died several hundred years ago
as a spoken language - and efforts to revive it by adopting it has yielded
mixed results. (The villages you mention are adopters). A language is said to
be living when 1) There are people who speak it for daily purposes 2) It
continues to evolve to address needs of the present. Sanskrit passes criteria
1 with some determined followers, but fails criteria 2. Point to be noted is
that characteristics that make Sanskrit orderly and strict, is an offshoot of
the language being ear marked for restricted scholarly usage and not the tenet
of a living breathing language. That said, there is a vast literary treasure
awaiting people who are determined to learn Sanskrit and there are enough
avenues available in India and abroad for the same.

------
jliechti1
This reminds me of an interesting short story entitled "Understand" that I
read a few years ago. The premise of the story deals with the question "what
would it be like to find meaning and order in everything you saw?". Naturally,
language is one facet of this.

 _"I'm designing a new language. I've reached the limits of conventional
languages, and now they frustrate my attempts to progress further. They lack
the power to express concepts that I need, and even in their own domain,
they're imprecise and unwieldy. They're hardly fit for speech, let alone
thought."_

Full story here: <http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm>

------
habosa
This article is a great read, I read it a while back and was blown away. I
never gave any thought to the advantages of any language over any other, I
always looked at it with the programmer's lens. Just as all modern programming
languages are Turing Complete and therefore equivalent (preferences aside), I
assumed that the same would be true for most spoken languages. Ithkuil and the
like really show that there is a lot more room for variety than most people
imagine.

~~~
th0114nd
To say that all languages are equivalent because they are Turing Complete is
just not true. That means they can decide the same class of problems, it does
not mean they can or do decide them in the same way. In particular some
languages are inherently faster than others.

~~~
tunesmith
Not sure where I read it, but it was recently - languages that sound faster
really just tend to have more syllables per concept, and all languages
generally tend to have the same speed of communicated concept.

~~~
btilly
Whoever said that was not a competent programmer, discussing programming
languages.

Research into programming languages says that lines of code written/day tends
to be surprisingly consistent. But the amount of functionality embedded in
that code varies widely depending on the language.

Faster languages are ones that take over basic mechanics for you (eg memory
management), infer things for you (eg compare C++ to go), or offer more
convenient abstractions (eg compare scripting languages to C or Java). The
difference is usually an order of magnitude, but can be more in the right
circumstances.

~~~
tunesmith
I'm talking about spoken languages. Spanish, for instance - low amount of
concepts per syllable, which is why it sounds so fast.

~~~
johnwatson11218
I read the same thing, the article I read also said that Chinese encodes more
info per sound so it sounds like the speakers are speaking more slowly.
English was somewhere in the middle.

------
tragomaskhalos
Some years ago I read a wonderful - and very opinionated - book entitled "The
Loom of Language", which opined that had Wilkins' "Real Character" (briefly
described in the article) become the norm for scienfific discourse then
scientific progress would have ground to a halt, because Wilkins' scheme
systematised human knowledge into a fixed hierarchy of concepts, but made no
allowance for _new_ concepts. I wonder if Ithkuil might suffer from the same
essential weakness (which is not to detract from the awe in which one must
hold such an exquisitly intricate creation)

------
webreac
"Ithkuil has two seemingly incompatible ambitions: to be maximally precise but
also maximally concise". I immediately thought about perl.

~~~
flyinRyan
What? You thought of perl as maximally precise? Have you ever used it? I wish
I could find the link about MJD doing some perl consulting, fixing an apparent
bug and then finding that what appeared to be a bug was yet another perl
special case.

