7 ms·

Ithkuil, the Most Complicated Language

139 points by lisper 3y ago

DoctorOW 3y ago
> Moreover, in line with this, Quijada has stated he does not believe a speaker would think necessarily any faster because even though Ithkuil is terse, a single word requires a lot more thought before it can be spoken than it would in a natural language. I can't imagine what this is like to think before I have words to describe them. My current thought process is an inner monologue and I can't imagine how I'd think if I couldn't put words to my ideas immediately.
- stefncb 3y ago
  It happens in any other language too, at least for me. Sometimes you have a thought but can't quite put it into words. My guess is that it's simply more pronounced in Ithkuil. Also, anecdotally, my inner monologue is sometimes behind my "real" thoughts. I can think faster than I can speak, even in my own head.
  - masklinn 3y ago
    It’s also super common with multiple languages, where you know what you mean in one language, but have trouble expressing it in an other.
- ajuc 3y ago
  Do you ever think in images or actions? For example when I'm navigating in a new place I sometimes have this "reorientation moment" when I thought something is forward, but I realize it's actually to the right. At the moment it feels like I have a map of the world in my mind and it rotates around me :) I get slight vertigo even :) As for actions you probably don't think to yourself "I should kick the ball in 3.. 2.. 1.. now! with THIS amount of spin and THAT power" - you just kick it when it's appropriate. Inner monologue would be too slow and too imprecise to think about these things. The same mode of thinking works for other things too. For example bad habits are automatic - you don't need to think "I should alt-tab to browser and open hackernews" - it's one thought expressed without language.
- juujian 3y ago
  I mean, how do I even know what I say before I said it? Speaking is such a social act, you can definitely pan out and say a few words (even if it's fillers) before your brain catches up and you create a plan. And then you adjust your plan based on audience response. The obsession with precision is strange. Vagueness in spoken language is a feature, not a bug. It makes social situations easier to navigate if you have an "out".
  - ajuc 3y ago
    Different languages are precise and vague in different domains. For example English requires articles. You can have a book or the book. You cannot just have book. In my native language we don't have articles. If I want to specify it's "a" book I can (with the word to the effect of "some"), if I want to specify it's "the" book I can (with the equivalent of "this" or "that"). But by default we don't care. On the other hand every verb encodes gender in my language. So when author wrote in English "Somebody in the audience said >I was with you<" - the translator has to guess what was the gender of that person. Because "was" is a different word depending on the gender of that person :) EDIT: I'm -> I was, because in present tense verbs can be the same :)
    - stefncb 3y ago
      What's your native language?
      - Joker_vD 3y ago
        I'd guess it's one of the non-Southern Slavic languages (e.g. Polish or Russian): those languages repurposed what used to be past participles (and so, just like adjectives, had genders) to be past tense verbs themselves. The Southern ones (e.g. Bulgarian) did not do this.
        ajuc 3y ago
        Yup, Polish.
        3y ago
- quirkot 3y ago
  That's totally wild. A huge part of my experience is trying to cram my thoughts into words that so rarely seem to fit. Makes texting (or any text communication without other context) stressful
Semaphor 3y ago
A little bit of discussion 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29103477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29103477
xena 3y ago
There's some great progressive rock by Kaduatán that uses Ithkuil for their lyrics: https://youtu.be/uuYmkZ-Aomo https://youtu.be/uuYmkZ-Aomo
- schoen 3y ago
  Wow! Quite a contrast with "sike tu li pona, li pona tawa mi, li pona tawa ma". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkNvlqEM8rk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkNvlqEM8rk
  - jstarfish 3y ago
    Toki Pona is far more elegant in its simplicity, and doesn't require the use of every diacritic ever documented...
fsiefken 3y ago
Like typing with a modified Dvorak like keyboard layout I imagine it would be more comfortable to think, read and speak in Ithkuil. It took me three months to switch from Qwerty to a Dvorak-like 20 years ago. I still can type both, even though it feels significantly less comfortable to type in Qwerty, I guess I’m spoiled. How long would it take for me to learn Ithkuil? I don’t have to speak it as there is no one understanding it (except other dorks on the internet), so it’s better to learn to read and write my personal notes in Ithkuil. This means I should also have a dvorak like Ithkuil TNIL keyboard layout. Is there such a thing? Ideally I also want to converse with a LLM trained on Ithkuil texts. As there are very few TNIL (the latest version) texts I wonder if somekind of translator can be build that can translate a large relevant body of English texts for me into Ithkuil.
- ibejoeb 3y ago
  It seems more like, if you do manage to internalize some of the language, that you might be able to augment your thinking language rather than replace it. For the things that are not readily expressible in your native language, Ithkuil could serve to characterize those thoughts. I do wonder how robust recall would be, though, in terms of time and fidelity.
  - lordnacho 3y ago
    What are some interesting examples of things I could express in Ithkuil? Suppose for an English speaker. I get that it will be weird to write an answer in English. Could be really interesting if someone has a good example though.
    - thrtythreeforty 3y ago
      One of my favorite examples: Aistlaţervièllîmļ - skipping an opportunity because it's not ideal, despite the likelihood that an ideal instance will never come
      - p-e-w 3y ago
ur-whale 3y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAJlr5C8fPA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAJlr5C8fPA (skip to 03:00)
yarg 3y ago
> The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis postulates that a person's language influences their perceptions and cognitive patterns. Stanislav Kozlovsky proposed[8] in the Russian popular-scientific magazine Computerra that a fluent speaker of Ithkuil, accordingly, would think "about five or six times as fast" as a speaker of a typical natural language. This seems to assume that one is thinking in their spoken language - but is that generally the case? Outside of reading, writing and communicating, I damned near never think in natural language. I don't know about other people, for anything technical I'm generally thinking in structures, not words.
- p-e-w 3y ago
  The idea that language and thought are the same thing was discarded decades ago, and no linguist uses the pop term "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" anymore (though linguistic relativity is still sometimes discussed). If the cited claim was even remotely true, there would be significant differences in the "speed of thought" between speakers of natural languages also (which differ in semantic density). Such cognitive superiority would have obvious real-world consequences, but no such phenomenon appears to exist.
  - kortex 3y ago
    Precisely. Languages have more or less information density ("bits per symbol"), but when you look at information rate per unit time, it all works out to pretty similar. Kind of like how QAM256 can convey more bits per symbol than QAM16, but it needs a lower baud for a given noise level, channel bandwidth, and error rate. You can squeeze out efficiency of a channel, but you can't overcome the noisy channel coding theorem max rate. https://seantrott.github.io/information/ https://seantrott.github.io/information/
- jerry1979 3y ago
  If this is topic is new to you, it is worth checking out some conversations about inner voice over at reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/nosurf/comments/10tnb8g/do_you_have_an_inner_monologue/ https://old.reddit.com/r/nosurf/comments/10tnb8g/do_you_have...
- 3y ago
shp0ngle 3y ago
For some reason, I started laughing uncontrollably when listening to the actual example linked there. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Ithkuil_pull_uiqisx.ogg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Ithkuil_...
- tempodox 3y ago
  Almost sounds like a speech recording played backwards. Actually playing this sample backwards indeed makes little difference to me.
- strikelaserclaw 3y ago
  sounds arabic
- kortex 3y ago
  I fucking love ithkuil, in the same way I love marble machines and Rube Goldberg devices. Like as a concept, in practice, how it sounds actually spoken, the writing system. Every thing about it is just so extra. It has its goals and design criteria, and it just goes full send on them, fuck everything else, like ease of pronunciation, and I respect that.
  - TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
    How do you feel about Kay(f)bop(t)?
- hoosieree 3y ago
  It's the audio equivalent to a Java programmer reading APL for the first time.
- optimalsolver 3y ago
  To me it sounds like a Samoyedic Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with classical Arabian inflections.
  - fernirello 3y ago
ilaksh 3y ago
He made a version of Ithkuil called "Ilaksh" which is what I used for my name on here.
TheRealPomax 3y ago
It's... interesting... to note that the example of a text in ithkuil takes up about as much space as the normal English text, due to how large ithkuil has to be written compared to regular text.
- uoaei 3y ago
  Spoken language tends to converge at ~40 bits per second for all natural human languages.[1] I wouldn't be surprised that if separate scripts were developed independently for each language they would all converge on a certain rate of information per square centimeter as well. [1] https://www.science.org/content/article/human-speech-may-have-universal-transmission-rate-39-bits-second https://www.science.org/content/article/human-speech-may-hav...
- fsiefken 3y ago
  If you look at the v4 example sheet liked to at ithkuil.place you see that it is roughly the same length as English, keep in mind it has a larger alphabet so to really compare one needs to transcribe to the ascii adaptation
julienchastang 3y ago
There was an article about Ithkuil a while back in the New Yorker [0]. It's a funny read. The most successful constructed language remains Esperanto, I believe. [0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-beginners https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-be...
- pmoriarty 3y ago
  Doesn't Klingon have more speakers than Esperanto?
  - ithkuil 3y ago
    it sounds like one of those things which people wish they were true but are likely not. There are 10k fluent esperanto speakers and an order of magnitude more "active speakers". According to http://klingon.wiki/En/FluentSpeakers http://klingon.wiki/En/FluentSpeakers there are ~30 fluent klingon speakers My father is a fluent esperanto speaker. He's in the 10k group. I can understand the language a bit passively. I'm among 1 million people who can. There are 10 million people who have learned a bit of esperanto in their lives. I don't think kingon numbers are nowhere close to that, but I only found a reference to the fluent klingon speakers (the 20-50 of them)
    - zarzavat 3y ago
      Also Esperanto has native speakers, i.e. children who grew up speaking Esperanto from an early age. It even has second generation native speakers: native speakers whose parents were also native speakers. Klingon has nothing like that.
gleki 3y ago
Discord server for Ithkuil exists btw https://discord.com/invite/WgFrX8J https://discord.com/invite/WgFrX8J
bertil 3y ago
A month ago, a father shared a very compelling story about how his young son started his own conlang and how ChatGPT was able to learn it from a few examples and converse into it. Has that trend taken over more established conlang? Would it make sense for those communities to train an LLM to speak that language as fluently as possible to help materialize it: build lessons, have a conversation partner at any time, and possibly discuss grammar?
- int_19h 3y ago
  Even GPT-4 is not actually that good at it, and breaks down past a few simple rules. If you want an LLM to actually learn a language, today, you have to include enough of that language in its training data to begin with (I'm not sure if anyone tried it with fine-tuning).
throw4847285 3y ago
Inspired by a Heinlein novella? No thank you. Why is it that sci-fi authors trick otherwise smart people into thinking they have the key to some kind of universal truth as opposed to just being skilled prose stylists with a sense of drama?
- lucideer 3y ago
  Because those otherwise smart people are looking for that universal truth and if they didn't find it in scifi they'd find it somewhere else.
  - throw4847285 3y ago
    Nah. Compare it with fantasy authors. Nobody thinks that Tolkien or Robert Jordan was putting forward some kind of aspirational project for better living through whatever. But people read Asimov and take psychohistory way too seriously, or read Heinlein and become a libertarian crank or invent a language. And let's not dwell too much on the extreme end of that scale, a certain writer with some funny ideas about mainstream psychology.
    - schoen 3y ago
      I think Tolkien in particular felt he had a moral and spiritual message, although the way to act on it, if any, presumably wouldn't be to pretend to be living in his Third Age.
    - digging 3y ago
      > Nobody thinks that Tolkien ... was putting forward some kind of aspirational project for better living through whatever. Actually I think that's a fair argument to make about LOTR. The simple, rustic wholesomeness of the Hobbits, the valor and respect of the Men, and even the friendship of a Dwarf and an Elf destroyed rapacious greed multiple times. I think even the Scouring episode at the end of the novels, while it may seem unimportant to the plot, can be considered important to the message of resisting industrialization. But I'm not a Tolkien scholar myself so take this all with a grain of salt.
jiggawatts 3y ago
Interesting that GPT 4 will happily translate to Esperanto, Klingon, Elvish, Aramaic, and Babylonian, but throws its up when asked to translate to Ithkuil!
deafpolygon 3y ago
> The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis postulates that a person's language influences their perceptions and cognitive patterns. While this might be true to a certain extent [I personally doubt this hypothesis], the real limiter is how we can efficiently express or share the language with others. We are social creatures, after all, and we cannot thrive in a vacuum. If the language is too hard to learn among the general population - the ideas cannot be spread out and disseminated by others. Thus we can't engage in a positive feedback loop where ideas are also shared back to us (supposing as individuals, we only knew this language). That's my theory, anyways, and one of the reasons why English has been so successful - not because it's the "best" language [spoiler: it's not], but for all its flaws - it is relatively easy to learn and communicate (and express ideas) in.

139 points by lisper 3y ago

> Moreover, in line with this, Quijada has stated he does not believe a speaker would think necessarily any faster because even though Ithkuil is terse, a single word requires a lot more thought before it can be spoken than it would in a natural language. I can't imagine what this is like to think before I have words to describe them. My current thought process is an inner monologue and I can't imagine how I'd think if I couldn't put words to my ideas immediately.

stefncb 3y ago
It happens in any other language too, at least for me. Sometimes you have a thought but can't quite put it into words. My guess is that it's simply more pronounced in Ithkuil. Also, anecdotally, my inner monologue is sometimes behind my "real" thoughts. I can think faster than I can speak, even in my own head.
- masklinn 3y ago
  It’s also super common with multiple languages, where you know what you mean in one language, but have trouble expressing it in an other.
ajuc 3y ago
Do you ever think in images or actions? For example when I'm navigating in a new place I sometimes have this "reorientation moment" when I thought something is forward, but I realize it's actually to the right. At the moment it feels like I have a map of the world in my mind and it rotates around me :) I get slight vertigo even :) As for actions you probably don't think to yourself "I should kick the ball in 3.. 2.. 1.. now! with THIS amount of spin and THAT power" - you just kick it when it's appropriate. Inner monologue would be too slow and too imprecise to think about these things. The same mode of thinking works for other things too. For example bad habits are automatic - you don't need to think "I should alt-tab to browser and open hackernews" - it's one thought expressed without language.
juujian 3y ago
I mean, how do I even know what I say before I said it? Speaking is such a social act, you can definitely pan out and say a few words (even if it's fillers) before your brain catches up and you create a plan. And then you adjust your plan based on audience response. The obsession with precision is strange. Vagueness in spoken language is a feature, not a bug. It makes social situations easier to navigate if you have an "out".
- ajuc 3y ago
  Different languages are precise and vague in different domains. For example English requires articles. You can have a book or the book. You cannot just have book. In my native language we don't have articles. If I want to specify it's "a" book I can (with the word to the effect of "some"), if I want to specify it's "the" book I can (with the equivalent of "this" or "that"). But by default we don't care. On the other hand every verb encodes gender in my language. So when author wrote in English "Somebody in the audience said >I was with you<" - the translator has to guess what was the gender of that person. Because "was" is a different word depending on the gender of that person :) EDIT: I'm -> I was, because in present tense verbs can be the same :)
  - stefncb 3y ago
    What's your native language?
    - Joker_vD 3y ago
      I'd guess it's one of the non-Southern Slavic languages (e.g. Polish or Russian): those languages repurposed what used to be past participles (and so, just like adjectives, had genders) to be past tense verbs themselves. The Southern ones (e.g. Bulgarian) did not do this.
      - ajuc 3y ago
        Yup, Polish.
      - 3y ago
quirkot 3y ago
That's totally wild. A huge part of my experience is trying to cram my thoughts into words that so rarely seem to fit. Makes texting (or any text communication without other context) stressful

Semaphor 3y ago

A little bit of discussion 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29103477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29103477

xena 3y ago

There's some great progressive rock by Kaduatán that uses Ithkuil for their lyrics: https://youtu.be/uuYmkZ-Aomo https://youtu.be/uuYmkZ-Aomo

schoen 3y ago
Wow! Quite a contrast with "sike tu li pona, li pona tawa mi, li pona tawa ma". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkNvlqEM8rk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkNvlqEM8rk
- jstarfish 3y ago
  Toki Pona is far more elegant in its simplicity, and doesn't require the use of every diacritic ever documented...

fsiefken 3y ago

Like typing with a modified Dvorak like keyboard layout I imagine it would be more comfortable to think, read and speak in Ithkuil. It took me three months to switch from Qwerty to a Dvorak-like 20 years ago. I still can type both, even though it feels significantly less comfortable to type in Qwerty, I guess I’m spoiled. How long would it take for me to learn Ithkuil? I don’t have to speak it as there is no one understanding it (except other dorks on the internet), so it’s better to learn to read and write my personal notes in Ithkuil. This means I should also have a dvorak like Ithkuil TNIL keyboard layout. Is there such a thing? Ideally I also want to converse with a LLM trained on Ithkuil texts. As there are very few TNIL (the latest version) texts I wonder if somekind of translator can be build that can translate a large relevant body of English texts for me into Ithkuil.

ibejoeb 3y ago
It seems more like, if you do manage to internalize some of the language, that you might be able to augment your thinking language rather than replace it. For the things that are not readily expressible in your native language, Ithkuil could serve to characterize those thoughts. I do wonder how robust recall would be, though, in terms of time and fidelity.
- lordnacho 3y ago
  What are some interesting examples of things I could express in Ithkuil? Suppose for an English speaker. I get that it will be weird to write an answer in English. Could be really interesting if someone has a good example though.
  - thrtythreeforty 3y ago
    One of my favorite examples: Aistlaţervièllîmļ - skipping an opportunity because it's not ideal, despite the likelihood that an ideal instance will never come
    - p-e-w 3y ago

ur-whale 3y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAJlr5C8fPA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAJlr5C8fPA (skip to 03:00)

yarg 3y ago

> The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis postulates that a person's language influences their perceptions and cognitive patterns. Stanislav Kozlovsky proposed[8] in the Russian popular-scientific magazine Computerra that a fluent speaker of Ithkuil, accordingly, would think "about five or six times as fast" as a speaker of a typical natural language. This seems to assume that one is thinking in their spoken language - but is that generally the case? Outside of reading, writing and communicating, I damned near never think in natural language. I don't know about other people, for anything technical I'm generally thinking in structures, not words.

p-e-w 3y ago
The idea that language and thought are the same thing was discarded decades ago, and no linguist uses the pop term "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" anymore (though linguistic relativity is still sometimes discussed). If the cited claim was even remotely true, there would be significant differences in the "speed of thought" between speakers of natural languages also (which differ in semantic density). Such cognitive superiority would have obvious real-world consequences, but no such phenomenon appears to exist.
- kortex 3y ago
  Precisely. Languages have more or less information density ("bits per symbol"), but when you look at information rate per unit time, it all works out to pretty similar. Kind of like how QAM256 can convey more bits per symbol than QAM16, but it needs a lower baud for a given noise level, channel bandwidth, and error rate. You can squeeze out efficiency of a channel, but you can't overcome the noisy channel coding theorem max rate. https://seantrott.github.io/information/ https://seantrott.github.io/information/
jerry1979 3y ago
If this is topic is new to you, it is worth checking out some conversations about inner voice over at reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/nosurf/comments/10tnb8g/do_you_have_an_inner_monologue/ https://old.reddit.com/r/nosurf/comments/10tnb8g/do_you_have...
3y ago

shp0ngle 3y ago

For some reason, I started laughing uncontrollably when listening to the actual example linked there. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Ithkuil_pull_uiqisx.ogg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Ithkuil_...

tempodox 3y ago
Almost sounds like a speech recording played backwards. Actually playing this sample backwards indeed makes little difference to me.
strikelaserclaw 3y ago
sounds arabic
kortex 3y ago
I fucking love ithkuil, in the same way I love marble machines and Rube Goldberg devices. Like as a concept, in practice, how it sounds actually spoken, the writing system. Every thing about it is just so extra. It has its goals and design criteria, and it just goes full send on them, fuck everything else, like ease of pronunciation, and I respect that.
- TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
  How do you feel about Kay(f)bop(t)?
hoosieree 3y ago
It's the audio equivalent to a Java programmer reading APL for the first time.
optimalsolver 3y ago
To me it sounds like a Samoyedic Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with classical Arabian inflections.
- fernirello 3y ago

ilaksh 3y ago

He made a version of Ithkuil called "Ilaksh" which is what I used for my name on here.

TheRealPomax 3y ago

It's... interesting... to note that the example of a text in ithkuil takes up about as much space as the normal English text, due to how large ithkuil has to be written compared to regular text.

uoaei 3y ago
Spoken language tends to converge at ~40 bits per second for all natural human languages.[1] I wouldn't be surprised that if separate scripts were developed independently for each language they would all converge on a certain rate of information per square centimeter as well. [1] https://www.science.org/content/article/human-speech-may-have-universal-transmission-rate-39-bits-second https://www.science.org/content/article/human-speech-may-hav...
fsiefken 3y ago
If you look at the v4 example sheet liked to at ithkuil.place you see that it is roughly the same length as English, keep in mind it has a larger alphabet so to really compare one needs to transcribe to the ascii adaptation

julienchastang 3y ago

There was an article about Ithkuil a while back in the New Yorker [0]. It's a funny read. The most successful constructed language remains Esperanto, I believe. [0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-beginners https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-be...

pmoriarty 3y ago
Doesn't Klingon have more speakers than Esperanto?
- ithkuil 3y ago
  it sounds like one of those things which people wish they were true but are likely not. There are 10k fluent esperanto speakers and an order of magnitude more "active speakers". According to http://klingon.wiki/En/FluentSpeakers http://klingon.wiki/En/FluentSpeakers there are ~30 fluent klingon speakers My father is a fluent esperanto speaker. He's in the 10k group. I can understand the language a bit passively. I'm among 1 million people who can. There are 10 million people who have learned a bit of esperanto in their lives. I don't think kingon numbers are nowhere close to that, but I only found a reference to the fluent klingon speakers (the 20-50 of them)
  - zarzavat 3y ago
    Also Esperanto has native speakers, i.e. children who grew up speaking Esperanto from an early age. It even has second generation native speakers: native speakers whose parents were also native speakers. Klingon has nothing like that.

gleki 3y ago

Discord server for Ithkuil exists btw https://discord.com/invite/WgFrX8J https://discord.com/invite/WgFrX8J

bertil 3y ago

A month ago, a father shared a very compelling story about how his young son started his own conlang and how ChatGPT was able to learn it from a few examples and converse into it. Has that trend taken over more established conlang? Would it make sense for those communities to train an LLM to speak that language as fluently as possible to help materialize it: build lessons, have a conversation partner at any time, and possibly discuss grammar?

int_19h 3y ago
Even GPT-4 is not actually that good at it, and breaks down past a few simple rules. If you want an LLM to actually learn a language, today, you have to include enough of that language in its training data to begin with (I'm not sure if anyone tried it with fine-tuning).

throw4847285 3y ago

Inspired by a Heinlein novella? No thank you. Why is it that sci-fi authors trick otherwise smart people into thinking they have the key to some kind of universal truth as opposed to just being skilled prose stylists with a sense of drama?

lucideer 3y ago
Because those otherwise smart people are looking for that universal truth and if they didn't find it in scifi they'd find it somewhere else.
- throw4847285 3y ago
  Nah. Compare it with fantasy authors. Nobody thinks that Tolkien or Robert Jordan was putting forward some kind of aspirational project for better living through whatever. But people read Asimov and take psychohistory way too seriously, or read Heinlein and become a libertarian crank or invent a language. And let's not dwell too much on the extreme end of that scale, a certain writer with some funny ideas about mainstream psychology.
  - schoen 3y ago
    I think Tolkien in particular felt he had a moral and spiritual message, although the way to act on it, if any, presumably wouldn't be to pretend to be living in his Third Age.
  - digging 3y ago
    > Nobody thinks that Tolkien ... was putting forward some kind of aspirational project for better living through whatever. Actually I think that's a fair argument to make about LOTR. The simple, rustic wholesomeness of the Hobbits, the valor and respect of the Men, and even the friendship of a Dwarf and an Elf destroyed rapacious greed multiple times. I think even the Scouring episode at the end of the novels, while it may seem unimportant to the plot, can be considered important to the message of resisting industrialization. But I'm not a Tolkien scholar myself so take this all with a grain of salt.

jiggawatts 3y ago

Interesting that GPT 4 will happily translate to Esperanto, Klingon, Elvish, Aramaic, and Babylonian, but throws its up when asked to translate to Ithkuil!

deafpolygon 3y ago

> The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis postulates that a person's language influences their perceptions and cognitive patterns. While this might be true to a certain extent [I personally doubt this hypothesis], the real limiter is how we can efficiently express or share the language with others. We are social creatures, after all, and we cannot thrive in a vacuum. If the language is too hard to learn among the general population - the ideas cannot be spread out and disseminated by others. Thus we can't engage in a positive feedback loop where ideas are also shared back to us (supposing as individuals, we only knew this language). That's my theory, anyways, and one of the reasons why English has been so successful - not because it's the "best" language [spoiler: it's not], but for all its flaws - it is relatively easy to learn and communicate (and express ideas) in.