4 ms·

> I imagine it would be more comfortable to think, read and speak in Ithkuil There are some cognitive scientists who believe that the ability to use language i

by p-e-w 3y ago

> I imagine it would be more comfortable to think, read and speak in Ithkuil There are some cognitive scientists who believe that the ability to use language is built into the human brain, and (natural) language acquisition basically involves just setting the "parameters" of that built-in system. If that is true, there's no reason to assume that a highly constructed language like Ithkuil can ever be as comfortable to use as a natural language that has evolved to be compatible with our brain's language mechanism. Language has been with humans for a very long time (up to 100k years according to some hypotheses); it's not just another tool like a keyboard layout, which I believe might be the main reason why all conlangs from the past 100 years have failed to reach widespread adoption, despite their numerous claimed advantages. The assumption that humans are able to intellectually construct a language that is usable as a human language in the same way natural languages are lacks any evidence.

meepmorp 3y ago
> There are some cognitive scientists who believe that the ability to use language is built into the human brain, and (natural) language acquisition basically involves just setting the "parameters" of that built-in system. This, by the way, is essentially what Chomsky means by “universal grammar,” in his writing - the inborn language capability and its fundamental structure. His theoretical framework even went through a period where it was called Principles and Parameters.
kortex 3y ago
As someone who tinkers with conlangs as a hobby and has been working on a similarly highly-engineered language not unlike ithkuil in features, this is one of the main things I struggle with. Actual natural language is very fluid. Spelling, pronunciation, grammar, all shift around, and for all manner of reasons. But the main one is efficiency. Humans are always subconsciously trying to cram as much information into as little time as possible, while preserving enough intent. This means extra redundant information whittles away, but there has to be enough redundancy for error correction. With these highly compressed languages, the problem becomes that a slight mispronounciation or misspelling can totally mess with the meaning in ways which lead to confusion. There are just too many phonemic sounds (a given sound difference is phonemic if the distinction matters, eg in English, p and p' (aspiration) is non-phonemic, but in Korean it is) When you actually analyze languages for their "baud rate" so to speak, languages with more symbol diversity (English) have less phonemes per unit time, while languages with less symbol diversity (Italian) have more phonemes, but the overall entropy per unit time works out pretty much the same. (I can't find my exact source right now, but if you poke around keywords like spoken language entropy rate, there's quite a bunch). Basically when you have machine code as a language, you pretty much need machine brain to process it. Edit: here's a start of some sources: https://seantrott.github.io/information/ https://seantrott.github.io/information/ Which mostly cites https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594 Also: re why no conlangs have taken over, momentum is a huge thing. We still have big iron running COBOL. Now imagine you hear COBOL from the moment you are born, for hours a day, you start babbling in COBOL, basically everyone around you converses in COBOL. It would be thoroughly entrenched. There's a reason "English follows other languages down dark alleys, beats them up and rifles through their pockets for vocabulary". It is the lingua franca. It's incredibly flexible and extensible, and combined with superpower hegemony, it dominates. Any dominant language is bound to acrete vocab and eject dead weight (though why we still have dental fricatives is really weird).
- zubairshaik 3y ago
  Where would you say Esperanto sits on the "natural" scale, since it's design goal is to be easy to learn and use as opposed to being highly compressed? As I wouldn't say its "[s]pelling, pronunciation, grammar, all shift around, and for all manner of reasons".
  - TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
    Many children have acquired Esperanto naturally, as a first language, and that does seem to work without any problems.
    - rerdavies 3y ago
      That seems like a very dangerous experiment to conduct on a child.
      - pseudalopex 3y ago
        How? Did you think they meant only language?
Garlef 3y ago
> has evolved to be compatible with our brain's language mechanism. Under the hypothesis that there actually is such a "language mechanism": There would be a host of other mechanisms a language needs to compatible with - such as spoken and written word - that might have contributed adversarial constraints along the way (from the perspective of optimal adjustment of a language with respect to this mechanism).
- meepmorp 3y ago
  There’s a whole strand of work in phonology (and other linguistics areas) called optimality theory, and the basic idea is that what you see in surface-level language is the the result of solving a competing constraints problem.
tikhonj 3y ago
> which I believe might be the main reason why all conlangs from the past 100 years have failed to reach widespread adoption Given how much people hate learning much more basic things—new programming languages, new operating systems, new tools—it seems hard to come to any conclusion about conlangs based on popularity! Languages are hard to learn, have immense cultural significance and are dominated by network effects. The potential advantages of a constructed language are, at best, illegible. What would push anybody to learn a brand new language well enough to actually use it? Whether or not a language becomes popular tells us little to nothing about the language itself.
Konohamaru 3y ago
Generative grammar is extremely nativist. The truth is, people will learn anything society forces them to learn. In Piraha society nobody is forced to learn recursion and consequently nobody thinks recursively or in numbers. The global languages of A.D. 2023 (English, French, etc...) are probably stuck in a similar "Chomsky tarpit" as Piraha, but because we're so globalized and together nobody is brave enough to look out of this tarpit. I am constructing a conlang codename LXX (because it has 70 phonemes, 15 vowels and 55 consonants, but they were carefully chosen to be learnable to pronounce unlike Ithkuil) for the purpose of getting at least one human society out of this tarpit.
- fsiefken 3y ago
  The new 2023 ithkuil addresses this with only 32 consonants and 9 vowels
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

by p-e-w 3y ago

meepmorp 3y ago

> There are some cognitive scientists who believe that the ability to use language is built into the human brain, and (natural) language acquisition basically involves just setting the "parameters" of that built-in system. This, by the way, is essentially what Chomsky means by “universal grammar,” in his writing - the inborn language capability and its fundamental structure. His theoretical framework even went through a period where it was called Principles and Parameters.

kortex 3y ago

As someone who tinkers with conlangs as a hobby and has been working on a similarly highly-engineered language not unlike ithkuil in features, this is one of the main things I struggle with. Actual natural language is very fluid. Spelling, pronunciation, grammar, all shift around, and for all manner of reasons. But the main one is efficiency. Humans are always subconsciously trying to cram as much information into as little time as possible, while preserving enough intent. This means extra redundant information whittles away, but there has to be enough redundancy for error correction. With these highly compressed languages, the problem becomes that a slight mispronounciation or misspelling can totally mess with the meaning in ways which lead to confusion. There are just too many phonemic sounds (a given sound difference is phonemic if the distinction matters, eg in English, p and p' (aspiration) is non-phonemic, but in Korean it is) When you actually analyze languages for their "baud rate" so to speak, languages with more symbol diversity (English) have less phonemes per unit time, while languages with less symbol diversity (Italian) have more phonemes, but the overall entropy per unit time works out pretty much the same. (I can't find my exact source right now, but if you poke around keywords like spoken language entropy rate, there's quite a bunch). Basically when you have machine code as a language, you pretty much need machine brain to process it. Edit: here's a start of some sources: https://seantrott.github.io/information/ https://seantrott.github.io/information/ Which mostly cites https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594 Also: re why no conlangs have taken over, momentum is a huge thing. We still have big iron running COBOL. Now imagine you hear COBOL from the moment you are born, for hours a day, you start babbling in COBOL, basically everyone around you converses in COBOL. It would be thoroughly entrenched. There's a reason "English follows other languages down dark alleys, beats them up and rifles through their pockets for vocabulary". It is the lingua franca. It's incredibly flexible and extensible, and combined with superpower hegemony, it dominates. Any dominant language is bound to acrete vocab and eject dead weight (though why we still have dental fricatives is really weird).

zubairshaik 3y ago
Where would you say Esperanto sits on the "natural" scale, since it's design goal is to be easy to learn and use as opposed to being highly compressed? As I wouldn't say its "[s]pelling, pronunciation, grammar, all shift around, and for all manner of reasons".
- TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
  Many children have acquired Esperanto naturally, as a first language, and that does seem to work without any problems.
  - rerdavies 3y ago
    That seems like a very dangerous experiment to conduct on a child.
    - pseudalopex 3y ago
      How? Did you think they meant only language?

Garlef 3y ago

> has evolved to be compatible with our brain's language mechanism. Under the hypothesis that there actually is such a "language mechanism": There would be a host of other mechanisms a language needs to compatible with - such as spoken and written word - that might have contributed adversarial constraints along the way (from the perspective of optimal adjustment of a language with respect to this mechanism).

meepmorp 3y ago
There’s a whole strand of work in phonology (and other linguistics areas) called optimality theory, and the basic idea is that what you see in surface-level language is the the result of solving a competing constraints problem.

tikhonj 3y ago

> which I believe might be the main reason why all conlangs from the past 100 years have failed to reach widespread adoption Given how much people hate learning much more basic things—new programming languages, new operating systems, new tools—it seems hard to come to any conclusion about conlangs based on popularity! Languages are hard to learn, have immense cultural significance and are dominated by network effects. The potential advantages of a constructed language are, at best, illegible. What would push anybody to learn a brand new language well enough to actually use it? Whether or not a language becomes popular tells us little to nothing about the language itself.

Konohamaru 3y ago

Generative grammar is extremely nativist. The truth is, people will learn anything society forces them to learn. In Piraha society nobody is forced to learn recursion and consequently nobody thinks recursively or in numbers. The global languages of A.D. 2023 (English, French, etc...) are probably stuck in a similar "Chomsky tarpit" as Piraha, but because we're so globalized and together nobody is brave enough to look out of this tarpit. I am constructing a conlang codename LXX (because it has 70 phonemes, 15 vowels and 55 consonants, but they were carefully chosen to be learnable to pronounce unlike Ithkuil) for the purpose of getting at least one human society out of this tarpit.

fsiefken 3y ago
The new 2023 ithkuil addresses this with only 32 consonants and 9 vowels

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]