Ithkuil language
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Ithkuil (Iţkuîl) is an extremely dense constructed human language created by American linguist John Quijada between 1978 and 2004.
In the author's description of Ithkuil: "A Philosophical Design for a Hypothetical Language", it appears as a cross between an a priori philosophical language and a logical language. The creator attempts to show how human languages could or may function. Ithkuil is designed to convey large amounts of linguistic information using fewer and shorter words than naturally-evolved languages; most sentences in other languages will be shorter when translated into Ithkuil. The language also designed to more overtly express deep levels of human cognition than is found in natural languages, particularly in regard to human categorization. It also strives to minimize the ambiguities and semantic vagueness found in natural human languages.
Language description
- Lexicon: The lexicon potentially consists of 3,600 word roots (of which only about a thousand are implemented so far), each consisting of 2 or 3 consonants; any root may be changed by extremely complex rules of grammar that make it possible to create an enormous number of derivatives.
- Phonology: Ithkuil uses a complicated phonological system (65 consonants and 17 vowels) based on sounds from a variety of languages such as Chechen or Abkhaz. It may be very difficult for a speaker of a typical western Indo-European language to pronounce some of the sounds.
- Morphophonology: Ithkuil is primarily synthetic and secondarily agglutinative. Ithkuil morphophonology utilizes both consonantal and vocalic mutation, shifts in syllabic stress and tone, and many different kinds of affixes, including prefixes, suffixes, infixes and interfixes.
Example
Citations
"The most remarkable aspect of Ithkuil is that it is the only life-threatening conlang."— Vlad, Zompist BBoard
"Ithkuil is actually an infinite phonetical and grammatical nightmare. It attempts to
merge all world languages to one big unlearnable and unpronouncable soup."
— Trebor Jung
(Quotes translated from text at http://ithkuil-russian.narod.ru)
Possible advantages
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that the language that a person speaks may affect his way of thinking. Stanislav Kozlovsky speculates[#endnote_Kozl] that a fluent speaker of Ithkuil, accordingly, would think up to five times faster than a speaker of a typical natural language. One may also argue that, Ithkuil being an extremely precise, synthetic language, its speaker would also have a clearer and deeper understanding of the world.There exists no human who can speak Ithkuil, including its creator: “I don't speak Ithkuil, never have, never will, never claimed to.” — said John Quijada #redirect [[Template:Fact]].
Future revision of Ithkuil
After the publication of an article about Ithkuil in the Russian magazine Computerra[#endnote_Kozl], several Russian-speakers contacted Quijada and expressed interest in learning the language. Quijada has worked out a complete revision of the language's morpho-phonology to reduce the number of phonemes from 82 to 48 in order to make the language easier to pronounce (as requested by several people who claim they want to learn it), and is expected to post the revised alternative sometime in 2007. The revision of Ithkuil is tentatively called Iláksh, and information about this revision can be found [here]. A [new script] is considered.References
- ↑ [«Скорость мысли», Станислав Козловский] — (Russian) Speed of thought by Stanislav Kozlovsky, Computerra, №26-27, June 20, 2004
External links
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