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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 t
by 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 agoWhat 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 agoOne 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 agoBut that concept can also be expressed in English – which you just did. If you simply run the English description you gave through a Huffman coder, you should get a compressed version that is the same length or even shorter than the Ithkuil word (English usually compresses to about 1 bit per character). Is Ithkuil anything more than a compressed encoding of English? Can it express any concept that English is fundamentally incapable of expressing?
- adastra22 3y agoNo, because English is the linguistic equivalent of Turing complete. There is no concept you can’t express (if verbosely) in English. But the weak form of Sapir-Worf is that verbosity and grammar matters, that we tend to think in shortest forms, and that if we had a mother tongue or native-level language that was expressive, precise, and minimally ambiguous, that would be reflected in the clarity of our thinking.
- p-e-w 3y ago> English is the linguistic equivalent of Turing complete Proof?
- adastra22 3y agoYou are asking for a proof of a negative, which can’t be proven. Nevertheless I offer the entire field of computational semantics, which has yet to generate a counter-example.
- kortex 3y agoEnglish (or any human language with the possible exception of Pirahã) is not a formal grammar, but if it was, it would behave like a recursively enumerable one, at the top of the Chomsky hierarchy. Given enough time and enough text, you can express anything computable. Think about it this way, I give you instructions in english, and you have to follow them: You are acting as a turing machine. Your symbols are s1, s2, ..., sn. Here are your processing rules: ... Here is your tape: ... Begin! You could follow that process to the letter, given enough time, focus, and tape (insert xkcd reference about rocks in the desert).
- p-e-w 3y agoThis makes no sense to me. What does computability have to do with semantic expressiveness? You've demonstrated that English can generate every sequence of tokens, not that it can express every concept.
- kortex 3y agoIf a concept can be expressed as a sequence of tokens, then bam, we're done. If a concept can't be expressed as a sequence of tokens, then it doesn't really matter, because no language can, since some concepts exist which are not computable, and all languages have the same drawback. Either way, "English is the linguistic equivalent of Turing complete" is valid, since it is at the top of the hierarchy, and as powerful as any other language (eg everything Ithkuil can express, so can English).
- random_upvoter 3y agoDoes Ithkuil have any provisions to express power dynamics between speaker and listener, say politeness levels? For instance all languages that I know have constructions to soften up requests, or make statements less assertive.