
Ithkuil: A Philosophical Design for a Hypothetical Language - setra
http://www.ithkuil.net/
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scott_s
I found this New Yorker article helpful in providing context:
[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-
beg...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-beginners)

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sushisource
This is a _fascinating_ article for anyone who is considering reading it. Long
but absolutely worth it.

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elihu
Today I learned that George Soros learned Esperanto as his first language.

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scott_s
I was skeptical of that - and still am. His Wikipedia page says his father was
an "Esperantist" and that he was _taught_ Esperanto, as opposed to learning it
as his first language. I find that more likely.

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gliese1337
There is a series of progressive rock songs in Ithkuil written by John
Quijada, the language's creator, and sung by David Peterson, language creator
for _Game of Thrones_ and several other popular TV shows, available on
YouTube. The latest installment is here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAJlr5C8fPA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAJlr5C8fPA)

~~~
thomastjeffery
Pretty good musically, too.

It was a painfully long wait for the lyrics to start, though. Half of me
wanted to listen to the awesome intro, and the other half just wanted to hear
some damned Ithkuil. The former half won by small margin.

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tunesmith
So, I'm not sure if it was the earlier article about this, or another
documentary I saw, but I think it's been established that even as different
languages have different "speeds" in terms of syllables uttered, the rate of
communicated meaning is roughly the same across modern languages.

I wonder if that would hold up with this language as well - if it is so
concise and precise, would it just mean that people take a while to speak it,
and take a while to understand it after hearing it, before responding? Or is
it possible that it's more Neo-in-the-matrix like where we'd immediately
understand some complex idea right when it is uttered? I believe the former
would be more likely but have no idea.

~~~
dkural
I am not sure. In Turkish, for instance:

bakimliliastiramadiklarimizdanmisiniz?

It's a single word. It means: Are you one of those people who we tried to
convert to take care of themselves better but failed to do so?

The language proposed reminds me in some ways to Turkish :)

~~~
schoen
I've been curious about the extent to which people commonly use some of these
long theoretically possible Turkish words. I was curious about that for
German, too, before learning it; my impression since then is that German
compound nouns with more than three or so base nouns are rare in practice
(maybe outside of a few technical contexts, like names of legislation).
Germans love to give examples about a Danube steamship company captain's hat
or a rhubarb-loving barbarian's bar and so on, but they probably wouldn't
actually _use_ such words spontaneously. So, how does word length work out in
day-to-day use of Turkish?

~~~
muricula
Anecdotally as a second language speaker of Turkish, day to day Turkish
doesn't​ use words that long. That's mostly just one of several very similar
phrases used to point out how long and creative Turkish suffixes can get.
However, many words one uses in day to day conversation have two or three
suffixes tacked on. I'd say most words in a sentence have at least one suffix.
Formal written Turkish you might find in a newspaper article discussing the
latest political developments uses words with even more abstract suffixes.
Such formal writing also uses long winded sentences which would be considered
run-on in English and could occasionally be translated into a whole paragraph.
It's a fascinating language!

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sburlappp
I'm surprised no one yet has compared Ithkuil to Babel-17:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babel-17](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babel-17)

In the story, it's described as a language which forces clear thought, while
secretly also forcing a change of beliefs.

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jjaredsimpson
At first I thought it seemed like the kind of language machines will invent to
communicate with each other.

But then I realized it's main features aren't clarity and precision. But
instead it's a just another way of mapping human mental models to encoders and
decoders. Speech and script on to ears and mouths and eyes.

Machines will have fundentally different mental models of meaning and also be
able to create any encoder decoder pair to suit any range of sensors and
actuators​.

Machines could have a language in light, 3d printed objects could be scripts.
A sculpture could literally be art and treatise at the same time.

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redsummer
'Concise and precise' seems the be the goal of this language. Like assembly
language. It doesn't seem useful for mere humans. I would prefer playfulness
and ambiguity.

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whitten
I think precision is necessary if you expect to use the language to invoke
conclusions or as a basis for inference.

Ambiguity in this context means you can derive some information but not as
much as if it were precise.

"The weather is stormy" doesn't give you information about whether you need
snowshoes or rainboots.

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schoen
An interesting problem is that constructed languages that avoid _syntactic_
ambiguity by having a formal grammar with no unambiguous parsing (like Lojban
and, I think, Ithkuil) can still have _semantic_ ambiguity. In Lojban there is
never a syntactic ambiguity about what the asserted relationship between
concepts is, but the language community readily admits that the underlying
concepts themselves still contain cultural and other ambiguities, in terms of
whether given language users would _agree_ to apply those concepts to
particular things, situations, or people.

It's very possible that conlangs like Lojban and Ithkuil still contain
concepts about storms that don't require a speaker to indicate what kind of
precipitation the storm produced.

~~~
wolfgang42
I'm by no means a Lojban expert, but some fiddling with
[http://jbovlaste.lojban.org](http://jbovlaste.lojban.org) leads me to
"vilti'a" for "storm", a combination of "tcima" (x1 is weather/a
meteorological phenomenon [at place x2]) and "vlile" (x1 is violent/in a state
of violence). You can then further refine this, e.g. by adding "lindi" (x1 is
a lightning/electical arc) to get "lidvilti'a" for a thunderstorm [at place
x2].

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partycoder
I like Toki Pona more.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona)

Toki pona is another constructed language, but it is focused in minimalism and
being easy to learn. Despite the minimalism you can express many things with
it.

I would not use it for technological things though, since technological
concepts require to start being creative with neologisms that can be hard to
get.

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anaximander
Very cool idea, and impressively well-thought-out. I have long toyed with the
idea of a universal 'concept language' wherein all concepts can expressed as
one of a set of "root" concepts that has had a chain of generic
"transformations" applied to it.

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IgorPartola
Off topic: I used to know a guy named Ithkuil. It's not a common name in North
America, but it is definitely a personal name. I know how strange it is when
you find a random software project. Send after you. There are at least a
couple named "Igor" out there.

~~~
ilaksh
Are you sure they weren't actually named after the language? I have been using
it for gmail for many years (just because I am a fan, not connected to the
language other than that).

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IgorPartola
They were a post doc in 2004 so I doubt it.

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thomastjeffery
Interestingly, the creation of a new ultimate expressive conlang is its very
deprecation.

These languages begin with the notion that if the perfect language does not
exist, we must start over entirely. The very act of starting over prevents any
previous works from catching on.

I wonder what study has been done so far about specific linguistic paradigms
that would be comparable to study about programming language paradigms like
procedural vs functional, etc.

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thomastjeffery
Is anyone here familiar enough with conlangs to compare this to others (like
lobjan)?

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gliese1337
Which other ones? There're _thousands_. Even if you just consider "popular"
ones, there're a few hundred, for reasonable definitions of "popular".

Very briefly, lojban was conceived as a scientific experiment and tries to re-
build the structure of language from the ground up, based on logical
foundations with little or no connection to natural languages; the lexicon,
however, is derived algorithmically from natural languages, and there is no
particular emphasis on concision. Ithkuil, on the other hand, is much more of
an artistic project, which makes use of the same basic mechanisms exhibited by
natural languages but takes them to extremes in the pursuit of both precision
and concision, and has an a-priori vocabulary.

Lojban is generally classified as a loglang and an engelang, while Ithkuil is
generally classified as an engelang and an artlang.

The next most similar conlang to Ithkuil that I know of (and purely in my
opinion) would be Latejami by Rick Morneau. Latejami is designed as an
interlanguage for translation, and thus doesn't care much about concision
(partly because it's mostly supposed to be used by machines, not humans) but
does aim to be able to accurately represent any semantic structure that exists
in any natlang, and goes to great lengths to systematize its semantics in ways
similar to Ithkuil.

