Ithkuil: A Philosophical Design for a Hypothetical Language | Hacker News Reader

Ithkuil: A Philosophical Design for a Hypothetical Language

ithkuil.net

66 pointssimonebrunozzi29 comments

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If you found Ithkuil interesting, you might also enjoy:

* Loglan, a human language with a regular grammar.

* * Site: http://loglan.org/

* * Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan

* Toki Pona, an extremely simplified language.

* * Site: http://tokipona.org/

* * Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona

I find it interesting that you'd recommend Loglan instead of Lojban. Any reasoning behind that? ki'e .i co'o

I've been anticipating this comment :-) There are a few reasons:

1. I personally think that Loglan is a much more human language. You know, with capital letters and no overuse of the apostrophe.

2. I've been a somewhat active member of the Loglan Institute's mailing list. I still am a member, but I haven't posted anything in over twelve years, I think.

3. Back in the day, I also significantly improved the article about Loglan on the Russian Wikipedia. It had a “Good Article” badge for a few years, until a review found it “not good enough” :-/

4. Like a lot of Loglan-lovers, I think that the circumstances behind Lojban's “forking out” from Loglan are somewhat fishy. IIRC, there was some bad blood between “The Three Old Men” of Loglan and the Le Chevaliers, although my memory of the details is very holey.

I, too, have contributed to Wikipedia, although I don't really find my contributions to GA/FA efforts to have colored my preferences.

I'm not sure what you find "fishy" or "holey"; a trip down memory lane is relatively easy. Lojban's early history explains the "bad blood" very well: James Cooke Brown, inventor of Loglan and head of the Loglan institute, was upset that people wanted to use Loglan in their own ways, without his approval. [0][1] The dispute was so bad that the courts got involved. [2] The Logical Language Group decided that it would be better to fork the language than to deal with Brown's attempts to control the community.

pe'i ko tavla fo lo jbobau fi'o kansa lo se jbobau

Edit: I found lojbab's own words on the fork: https://mw.lojban.org/papri/the_Loglan-Lojban_Dispute

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban

[2] https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/5914bf26add7b049347ac5...

There is also Toaq, a similar predicate logic based language. Instead of many particles to modify meaning, it uses a system of 8 tones.

http://toaq.org

A friend of mine one jokingly but reasonably accurately described Ithkuil as, "Build a language with as much derivational morphology as humanly possible, then add some more, and you've got Ithkuil." It's a fascinating experiment and a lot of fun to read about.

As a fascinating side-note: the language was also at one point adopted by some kind of fringe pseudo-religious movement called "Psychonetics" as a "…technology of human consciousness." There's a fascinating article about Ithkuil, its creator, and its adoption by that movement here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-be... (and the previous HN discussion of it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8180493 )

I think those Psychonetics people were also inspired by Heinlein's ideas about Speedtalk[1] from “The Gulf”.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedtalk

I wish all religions would do cool stuff like that.

I have been fascinated by "human language" design for a long time, and reading about Ithkuil brought back a lot of memories. Designing a language is super hard!! I partially designed one to use in a novel I wrote ~16 years ago (the novel is only available in Italian). [0]

The language was called "galatico" (as a tribute to Isaac Asimov), it was comprised of 64 alphabet signs, represented by bit-like letters. In the novel you can get a few glimpses at the language design. It was fun. And hard. And fun.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Nonovvio-Italian-Simone-Brunozzi-eboo...

Sorry for your predictions about 2025 are going to be debunked in a few years :) I’ll keep the book on my list

Who knows? Maybe I was 100% right!! :)

Oh damn! I've been theorizing to my friends about a language like this. Assuming that linguistic relativity[1] holds true, this would be super cool to learn, and potentially highly effective as a form of communication. The author goes into this a bit in the FAQ[2]

Probably super hard to learn (if not effectively impossible)... Is there any "native level" speakers of Ithkuil? Seems unlikely, since even the author hasn't learned it fully.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity [2] http://www.ithkuil.net/faqs.html under "Some people have claimed that using Ithkuil, a person would be able to think five times faster. Do you believe this?"

As far as I understand it, the general scientific consensus is that linguistic relativity does not hold true. More anecdotally, I don't often find myself constructing sentences before having an intuitive (non-linguistic) understanding of what I am trying to express, and the process of putting ideas into words doesn't feel like it would be advantaged by high information density, but rather that the majority of filler-words are useful for smoothing out the process and providing information at a more controlled pace, which can be useful for things like adding emphasis to particular phrases and concepts.

From what I've seen, there is evidence for the weak linguistic relativity hypothesis. Is that wrong?

Not per se, but that would allow for any inefficiencies to be moved around, which is not contrary to what I'm arguing. It's quite a bold claim to say that people will think faster or more efficiently in general, but not as bold to say they will think faster or more efficiently about some things. You might be able to make a language more efficient for technical communication while making it less efficient for poetic communication, but I don't believe you can make a language more efficient at everything people need to communicate.

When I found out about this conlang several years ago I thought it was the most amazing thing. And so I adopted the name for my email address. And a variation for my HN account. I was hoping people would read about it and automatically become smarter. Lol.

I did receive a couple of emails in Russian that seemed to be about the language. But after browsing back like 95,000 gmail messages back to 2007 I am not able to find them. I just looked at like 30 pages of older messages, not all of them. I don't know how to search for Russian text in gmail. I tried Google Translate for hello but that just showed all messages that said hello in English.

It used to be possible to do something like "lang:russian" or "lang:ru" in the search box, but I think either the function has been deprecated, or I just have bad memory :)

If you think they were about the language, maybe try just searching for its name?

It seems to me that, in order for such an informationally dense language to actually be used, especially as spoken word, it would need to include a layer of error-correcting codes on top of the basic language. That could be a fascinating linguistic concept on its own, especially if one could design the error correcting layer in such a way that a human being (as opposed to a computer) could conceivably become fluent in it.

I would guess the author has thought if this; wonder if it already exists.

Gender in a lot of languages functions that way. If you missed the noun, the gender of articles and adjectives can help narrow down possibilities

Natural human grammar is error correcting codes, essentially. If sentence should e corrupted, e.g. like this one is, it usually is immediatly visible that is wrong, and what the “correct” should be.

IIRC, one of the criticisms of Ithkuil is that there’s so much semantics packed into the syntax that this doesn’t work for it- a corrupted Ithkuil sentence often turns out to be a valid sentence with a different meaning.

Yes, that's exactly why I think Ithkuil should have an error-correcting layer on top of it. It's interesting if one could be designed in a way that is different from natural language, but still useable and effective.

The mind-blowing story behind Ithkuil: It was created by a middle-aged self-educated postal worker. Years later, it became exteremely poplular among Russian Neo-nazis who wanted a philosophically “pure” language for their “pure” race. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-be...

Wow, seeing this posted really took me back! I, too, was obcessed with Ithkuil when I was in school. I thought it was just the best idea, to construct a dense, powerful, (dare I say) "perfect" language. Too bad I never actually got fluent in it, but then I saw a few years ago that he'd rebooted it as a new language. Conlangs and language design in general is a lot of fun, I'm glad to see he's still doing it.

Might want to tag this (2011)?

See also the latest update, a new language based on Ithkuil: http://www.ithkuil.net/new_morpho-phonology_v_0_8.pdf

After all those years, he's still at it! I remember a long time ago, when I was still in school, I've sent Mr. Quijada an E-Mail proposing some simplifications to the then-upcoming Ilaksh's phonetics. My English was much, much worse back then, but to my surprise, he actually replied! His response made my whole week or even month.

Ah, good suggestion! I'm the OP, but I guess only HN moderators can change the title at this point.

Anyone curious about ithkuil should apprise themselves of the attempt of the number two most wanted terrorist in Ukraine's tangential involvement with this language as a result of some Institute for the Harmo ious Development of Man or other (not the institute of Gurdjieff's, just similarly named)

“The native script used to represent Ithkuil is both alien and complex.”

interesting choice

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