9 ms·

An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

272 points by godarderik 12y ago

MichaelDickens 12y ago
Ithkuil seems like what a language should be: as the article said, it is both precise and concise. It looks the way Esperanto ought to have looked. I find Quijada's effort deeply impressive. I don't know much about designing human languages, but I know how hard it is to design a decent programming language (see http://colinm.org/language_checklist.html http://colinm.org/language_checklist.html), and building a serious human language seems orders of magnitude more difficult. I've never seen an attempt that really intrigued me until I found Ithkuil.
- hackerboos 12y ago
  I remember a criticism of Esperanto was that it was too similar to Europeans languages. I read about a language that was similar to Esperanto but incorporated Chinese and Arabic qualities. Does anybody know this?
  - andreasvc 12y ago
    It's really only the vocabulary which takes from European languages, because the grammar is schematic, very regular and simple to learn. Broadly speaking, you have two options: 1) you select a specific group (e.g., European languages) and sample from their vocabulary. 2) you sample from ALL the world's languages, or generate completely random words (effectively just as hard to learn). In the first case you have privileged one group, but in the second everyone loses ... In the second case you create an additional barrier because there is a large amount of new vocabulary that everyone has to learn, while in the other anyone who doesn't know European languages will have to learn some of its vocabulary, but that might be useful to them anyway, so it clearly seems like the better option to me.
- rodgerd 12y ago
  > Ithkuil seems like what a language should be: as the article said, it is both precise and concise. Language should be useful and expressive for its users. Human languages designed by the kind of people who prize simplicity and regularity above all other qualities tend to fail for much the same reason programming language designers are hurt and disappointed to discover C is still popular.
  - yepguy 12y ago
    Ithkuil is not simple. It's so ridiculously complex that it is just not possible for anyone to learn to speak fluently. It never stood any chance of being adopted in the way Esperanto has. I'm surprised that it found any use at all, but people without linguistics training seem to find it useful for discovering nuances in their own languages that they hadn't considered.
    - dunmalg 12y ago
      >people without linguistics training seem to find it useful for discovering nuances in their own languages that they hadn't considered. Learning any foreign language will tend to do that, though. It's a function of being forced to consider your native tongue as a language, rather than just speaking it. Plus if you learn a foreign language, you will have the advantage of being able to talk to an established base of people who speak it.
      - yepguy 12y ago
        Yes but Ithkuil is a bit unique in that it decided to include as many grammatical distinctions as possible.
- abruzzi 12y ago
  >Ithkuil seems like what a language should be: as the article said, it is both precise and concise. Which is good for scientists and logicians, but would probably be an issue for novelists and poets. Exploiting ambiguity is a common feature of the arts.
- canjobear 12y ago
  Given that you're communicating to an agent who can use context for disambiguation, all efficient languages will be ambiguous. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027711002496 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027711... (Sorry for the paywall...) So maybe Ithkuil isn't what a language should be after all. And maybe that's why no natural language looks like it...
  - induscreep 12y ago
    So basically language decoding is multimodal like one of the other comments here said? Like in digital communication, perfect decoding needs appropriate SNR (context) in addition to optimal spectral efficiency (conciseness/preciseness of the language). Interesting research.
- Steko 12y ago
  58 different phonemes means the language is just substituting one form of complexity for another. And apq’uxasiu for 'gawk' doesn't strike me as a particularly huge win for conciseness.
  - ZoFreX 12y ago
    > And apq’uxasiu for 'gawk' doesn't strike me as a particularly huge win for conciseness. It seems like it's missing the linguistic equivalent of huffman coding: make frequently used things shorter. Also, it's hardly concise with respect to time if you have to spend 30 minutes consulting a dictionary to utter a single sentence.
    - kazagistar 12y ago
      The huffman coding strategy relies too much on culture to remain properly useful over different groups and time.
- smsm42 12y ago
  Language should not be concise. Redundancy is built into the language for a reason - language communication is extremely noisy and if there's two-bit-error distance between "I love you" and "I killed and ate your dog" then the usage of this language by humans would not be comfortable. Moreover, people communicating are imperfect. So if you have a language which is very precise and concise, you would have to spend a lot of effort to find a word or set of words which exactly expresses your meaning (in programming, we call it design when we do it upfront, and debugging when we do it post factum) and communication would be a very complex exercise. However, if you have a lot of words which mean roughly the same, you can be sure the meaning is passed through even if the words are not chosen super-carefully.
  - RVuRnvbM2e 12y ago
    It's hard to overstate the importance of redundancy in natural languages. This is the whole reason we are able to make ourselves understood in a noisy, imprecise world. Even if you miss a few syllables - or even half a sentence, you can usually piece together what the other person was trying to say. Imagine someone technology-illiterate trying to describe a problem they're having with their computer in this language. Impossible.
    - danieldk 12y ago
      It's hard to overstate the importance of redundancy in natural languages. There are other factors at play, such that speech perception is multi-modal. E.g. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGurk_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGurk_effect
  - laichzeit0 12y ago
    In some languages the meaning of a word is highly dependent on the pitch accent, like ancient Greek. If you're 1 bit off you have trouble :) Surprising enough I read an example of this yesterday evening: "Hegelochus, the actor in Euripides' Orestes, which was presented in 408 BC, in line 279 of the play, instead of "after the storm I see again a calm sea" (galeén' horoo), Hegelochus recited "after the storm I see again a weasel" (galeên horoo)."
- andreasvc 12y ago
  Esperanto was designed first and foremost to be learnable, it seems to be quite successful in this regard whereas it's not a strong point of Ikthuil (as it wasn't a priority). With "ought to have looked", do you mean in your own opinion, or are you referring to some of Esperanto's original goals? I always got the impression that learnability and ease of use were bigger priorities. Personally, I don't have much faith in the idea that you can make people's communication more precise and concise by designing the language in a certain way, just as I don't think that politically correct language leads to meaningful change. This is simply because I don't believe than language can drastically change the way people think (linguistic determinism, strong Whorfianism). Esperanto is very similar to natural languages in its (im)precision, which might just be the level where humans naturally converge to if left to their own devices.
tomkinstinch 12y ago
The same thing happened to Blissymbols[1], as documented by radiolab[2]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols 2. http://www.radiolab.org/story/257194-man-became-bliss/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/257194-man-became-bliss/
- MBCook 12y ago
  That was a great episode. This has also happened with the language Lojban[1], which was 'forked' from Loglan[2] when the creator starting making copyright complaints so the community could maintain control. Such an odd concept that someone could 'own' a language, but I guess if you created it I can see why you would want to. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan
  - GeneralMayhem 12y ago
    It's a less odd concept if you compare it to Elvish rather than English.
  - mchaver 12y ago
    I think it's a great lesson for any creator. Just because you have invented something does not necessarily mean you have the right or are capable of dictating how people use it. I seem to remember Umberto Eco mentioning that he does not offer his own interpretations of his novels for a similar reason, but I can't find the quote.
    - Uncompetative 12y ago
      I can recommend his book. The Search for the Perfect Language - Umberto Eco - 2010
tokenadult 12y ago
This is attracting some reader interest here, so I should probably mention, for other Hacker News participants deeply interested in human languages, a definitive analysis of Esperanto[1] explaining why Esperanto has not caught on with more speakers. [1] http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/ http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/
- ketralnis 12y ago
  I don't think that explains anything; it looks like a list of aesthetic "faults" that the author finds, unlikely to be recognised by anyone without a degree in linguistics. Surely those faults exist, but it's a stretch to pretend that they alone explain anything. I speak some Esperanto but I'm no zealot. The "explanation" that your neighbours don't speak Esperanto, if such a simplified thing can exist, is probably as simple as network effects. I can learn German and speak to the man next-door, or I can learn Esperanto and speak to some theoretical people that may exist somewhere but I don't know them and they are mostly a bunch of nerds that meet at the local co-op to speak in Esperanto mostly about how great Esperanto is. Go ahead. Ask your neighbour why he doesn't speak Esperanto. Does he say " The 'basic' number‐terms tri, trio, tria ('three, threesome, third') are a crowded jumble, making a mockery of the regular root/noun/adjective pattern they imitate" (K5 in the article)? Or does he say "what's that?"?
  - Pamar 12y ago
    Agreed: studying Esperanto now makes as much sense as striving to provide CP/M compatibility in your product.
    - ketralnis 12y ago
      Please don't put words in my mouth, I don't think you agree with me at all. I think Esperanto is a fun hobby and I have fun toying with it every few years, even if I'm under no delusion that it's a practical way to, say, do international business. I do think that if it or any universal second language (French, English, Mandarin, whatever) were to suddenly become more widespread, the world would be better off. My claim was only that the reason that it's not more widespread has nothing to do with subjective flaws in the language itself.
wyager 12y ago
Can someone list a few popular constructed languages (maybe comparing them to programming languages)? I'd only heard of Lojban and Esperanto before reading this.
- doublec 12y ago
  Try http://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs http://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs for discussion and lists of languages. There are many subreddits for specific languages. For example, Toki Pona [1] and Lojban [2]. [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/tokipona http://www.reddit.com/r/tokipona [2] http://www.reddit.com/r/lojban http://www.reddit.com/r/lojban
- mchaver 12y ago
  Toki Pona is a minimalist language with a bit of a following. It has 120 root words and tries to build all concepts based on those. Loglan is a predecessor and inspiration to Lojban. Slovio is the Slavic version of Esperanto. Dothraki, Elvish (Quenya, Sindarin), Klingon, Na'vi are constructed languages from popular novels/movies.
  - dunham 12y ago
    One novel thing about Tolkien's languages: he constructed a root language (like proto-indo-european) and etymologies for them. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Etymologies_(Tolkien) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Etymologies_(Tolkien) )
  - iLoch 12y ago
    > Slovio is the Slavic version of Esperanto. Someone doesn't understand the point of Esperanto.
    - mchaver 12y ago
      Regardless of the point, the truth is Esperanto's lexicon is mostly inspired by Romance languages whereas Slovio's lexicon is mostly inspired by Slavic languages. It's not that shocking of a comparison.
selimthegrim 12y ago
Two things struck me about this article in hindsight when I read it. -- Whose pot did the Croats, Bosnians and Slovenes piss in to not make it into this super Slavic union? -- China Mieville wrote a book[0] along very similar thought lines which won the Locus Award. Also, Garkavenko appears not to have taken the obvious side [1] in Ukraine's present conflict given how he is described in Foer's article [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embassytown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embassytown [1] http://maidantranslations.com/2014/06/24/russian-volunteers-returning-home-from-donbas-will-bring-the-deadly-maidan-virus-to-russia/ http://maidantranslations.com/2014/06/24/russian-volunteers-...
lotsofmangos 12y ago
I wonder how well Ithkuil can be represented in Ian Banks' Marain script. http://trevor-hopkins.com/banks/a-few-notes-on-marain.html http://trevor-hopkins.com/banks/a-few-notes-on-marain.html
- gamegoblin 12y ago
  Ithkuil has well over double the number of phonemes as Marain, so the answer would probably be "not so well".
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    Rotation and reflection of the basic set extend the phonemes and can link together similar sounding ones in Marain, so I would have thought it would be achievable.
jqm 12y ago
Losing control of a language seems to be standard procedure. If this invented language were to catch on, it likely wouldn't be a generation or two and kids who grew up speaking it would start saying the Ithkuil equivalent of things like "yo dog, that's the rad shizaz!". Then, several generations thereafter grandmothers would be regularly using the word "shizaz" and they would have to put it in the dictionary. That's just the way it goes and is probably the reason we don't all speak the same language in the first place. That being said, I've always been fascinated by the idea of a systematically created universal language and think the world would be much better place with one....if that were possible. This was a neat article.
Terr_ 12y ago
I think there's some research out there that suggests all natural languages have about the same information density, when you factor how two people in conversation will add error-correction or extra context to frame an idea. IMO this suggests the bottleneck is something about our brains on a biological rather than linguistic level.
- micro_cam 12y ago
  i think it is more auditory and has to do with out ability to error correct. Actually there is a really fascinating section in james gleick's "the information" on African drum communication which is essentially a much less dense version of spoken language since you say everything using a long sentence which essentially reduces the possibility of it being misinterpreted despite most of the sounds of normal spoken language are missing. Not sure if more scholarly work supports this idea but if this is the case then a written or thought language could certainly be denser...like symbolic algebra or python.
- godarderik 12y ago
  According to a study published several years ago, mainstream languages seem to operate on an information density/speed tradeoff [1].The authors found that languages that are spoken faster seem to encode less information per syllable than those uttered at a slower pace. This does seem to suggest that biology may be the limiting role in controlling the rate at which humans convey information. Indeed, the language mentioned in the article seems almost laughably cryptic and dense. However, I feel that the limitation of the mentioned study results from the fact that it treats information on a relatively limiting per syllable basis. Quijada seems to suggest that an artificially constructed language has the ability to incorporate all the implicit meanings of a phrase that are left unsaid in normal conversation. Ultimately, while Quijada's project seems quite unlikely to catch on among those who are not fringe pseudoscientists, it poses interesting philosophical questions about the nature of speech and communication and perhaps earns its title as a "conceptual-art project." [1] http://rosettaproject.org/blog/02012/mar/1/language-speed-vs-density/ http://rosettaproject.org/blog/02012/mar/1/language-speed-vs...
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voronoff 12y ago
For anyone who is interested in what an ideal language would look like, particularly in respect to brevity vs. informativeness I'd highly suggest looking into Terry Regier's work: http://lclab.berkeley.edu/ http://lclab.berkeley.edu/ I worked in his lab on one of many projects showing that most human languages use a near optimal trade-off in various semantic domains (so far - color, kinship, containers, and spatial relations). His work also includes some of the best evidence for some language dependent forces in cognition interacting with some universal ones.
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ilaksh 12y ago
Ithkuil is definitely one of the most amazing pieces of work I have ever come across. I having been using the name as my email address for many years and another variant of it he had called 'ilaksh' as my screen name (note I didn't have anything to do with the creation of ithkuil/ilaksh, just a fan). I think not only other conlangers but also anyone interested in fields like linguistics, computer programming, knowledge representation, etc. can be inspired by what Quijada did. I did get a few somewhat weird emails that I think were in Russian some years ago, but I think they figured out pretty quick that it wasn't the right email address to reach Quijada.
sbussard 12y ago
another hacker news TL;DR article
- knieveltech 12y ago
  Too bad. It's a pretty good read.
  - JohnTHaller 12y ago
    It's a very interesting article. But it's done in old journalism/academic paper style where it takes 5 pages to get to the point and has huge multiparagraph asides that the reader is often uninterested in. I already know the history of esperanto... most people won't even care about it. I don't care at all that George Soros learned it as his first language, it's unrelated nonsense. Tell me about the topic of the article. If you want interested people to be able to learn more about Esperanto, link to a side article. We can do this today.
    - Uncompetative 12y ago
      Infodump
godarderik 12y ago
Reading this story brings to mind the history of algorithms in the field of machine translation. Early attempts at the problem attempted to explicitly define the rules of converting between tongues using meticulously laid out systems of vocabulary and syntax. This approach proved untenable, in part due to the complex and ever changing nature of language. Modern systems such as Google Translation make use of machine learning algorithms that are fed large amounts of source material and computationally discern relationships between them. I wonder if a similar approach could be taken with language construction. Instead of spending 25+ years fleshing out the details of a language in painstaking detail, computer programs could be devised that, using large amounts input, determine the most "efficient" means of expressing information. The approach would not only be far less labor intensive, it could also accommodate the rapidly evolving nature of language, for example adding to its "dictionary" in response to new phenomena in need of naming.
- mchaver 12y ago
  It sounds like an experiment worth testing out and could lead to some interesting results. On the other hand, I am imagine most conlangers enjoy devising the details of their language.
- erikb 12y ago
  In fact it doesn't just sound like an experiment worth doing. It sounds like something that somebody somewhere might have already done.
  - voronoff 12y ago
    To be glib, it has been done. We call it language. Seriously, though, take a look at the link I posted in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8180924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8180924 One of the techniques used is to computationally create a space of possible ways to partition semantic domains on a plane whose dimensions are simplicity and informativeness, in order to look at where in the possible space it is that real languages lie. While it's not been done (to my knowledge) for a whole language, it's potential direction to go.
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arsalanb 12y ago
>"Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process..." I'm in awe of the creator of Any language. Because to create a (Good) language isn't easy. This is true or both programming languages and otherwise. However, it comes without saying that adoption is a vital component of any language, and with mass adoption comes evolution. People will often make changes in languages, make their own dialects (based on things perhaps the can relate to on a deeper level, etc..). This isn't a bad thing. To me it only signifies growth and expansion of the language. +1
yongjik 12y ago
That was an interesting read, but the reporter's breathless assertions frequently got in the way of appreciating Quijada and his idea. I mean, things like: > A sentence like “On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point” becomes simply “Tram-mļöi hhâsmařpţuktôx.” Simply? We could have used LZW algorithm and the sentence could probably become even shorter, just a "simple" sequence of random-ish bytes. If you increase the number of allowed symbols, of course you need less symbols to convey the same information. If you allow for a limitless set of words that are dynamically generated from combining many roots, of course the number of words decreases... sometimes down to 1, as in polysynthetic languages. This is Information Theory 101.
- moconnor 12y ago
  The English text is 97 ASCII encoded bytes. Compressed with zlib: 86 bytes. Compressed with lzma: 98 bytes. The Ithkuil representation is just 30 UTF-8 encoded bytes. Compressed with zlib: 39 bytes. Compressed with lzma: 47 bytes. (Measured using python's zlib/pylmza modules to avoid e.g. file header overhead) It's hard to achieve this kind of compression without an external dictionary. What Quijada has created with Ithkuil is, in part, a dictionary for the space of human thought and concepts, something I wouldn't have expected to work in the way the article describes it.
  - Dylan16807 12y ago
    Actually, using zlib format gets you an unnecessary 2 byte header and 4 byte footer, so the proper sizes are 80 and 33. I'm having trouble figuring out what's going on with lzma because the spec is lying about the header, so I won't attempt to guess the correct number there.
based2 12y ago
http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/2dlsgl/utopian_for_beginners http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/2dlsgl/utopian_...
QuantumGood 12y ago
Seems this could contribute to accelerating artificial intelligence towards the possibility of the singularity.
ejr 12y ago
If anyone wants to hear what Ithkuil sounds like : https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Ithkuil_pull_uiqisx.ogg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Ithkuil_... From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil
- lloeki 12y ago
  > Ithkuil does not use the concept of zero Interesting. How is one supposed to talk about math without a concept of zero?
  - hrvbr 12y ago
    It's likely not missing the concept of zero but rather the symbol in the numbering system. The 0 is not necessary for representing integers (if there's a new symbol for 10). I'm pretty sure it is necessary to write the decimal part of a real number.
  - ejr 12y ago
    It's a fascinating problem. It makes me wonder, without zero, what paths mathematics would have taken. There have been civilisations that used math extensively without zero and I hope Ithkuil-fluent mathematicians some day would continue exploring this.
    - csirac2 12y ago
      "Zero: The Bibliography of a dangerous idea" was quite a memorable book for me, and goes into some good detail on those very points - even trying to guesstimate just how damage to progress of civilization by the numerous rejections of zero at several points in our early history. http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Zero.html?id=obJ70nxVYFUC&redir_esc=y http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Zero.html?id=obJ70nxV...
- SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
  Oh gods! It sounds like a tongue-twister played backwards. Clearly not designed for ease of pronunciation or for singing songs.
gabemart 12y ago
I found this article fascinating and satisfying. I'm curious about the desire to reduce ambiguity, which seemed to be emphasized as a motivation for the creation of Ithkuil and some of the other languages mentioned. Is it desirable to completely eliminate ambiguity? I can see why it would be desirable in a scientific paper or a public political debate. But in everyday interactions, (intentional) ambiguity plays many important roles. In my experience, politeness is bolstered by some level of ambiguity. Rather than explicitly state your needs, desires or opinions, you imply them at some level of abstraction, allowing other participants in the conversation to accept or decline more easily. Imagine Jessica who has brought two friends who don't know each other to see a play. They chit-chat a little afterwards, then Jessica goes home early leaving two virtual strangers to have a drink together. It's not hard to imagine the conversation going like this: A: "Did you enjoy the play?" B: "It was very interesting. I thought the stage dressing was a little unconventional." A: "Yes, I noticed that too. Very creative. I was intrigued by the style of the narration. It really let the audience write the story for themselves." B: "It certainly didn't constrain the imagination did it? I couldn't help noticing that many of the actors took a somewhat avant-garde interpretation of the source material." A: "Yes, as if they didn't want it to seem like they were 'acting', so to speak?" B: It was awful wasn't it!? A: Thank god! Yes, worst thing I've ever seen! Ambiguity allows subtle social cues (not so subtle in my example!) that avoid direct confrontation when it might be uncomfortable. If one person loved the play and the other hated it, they each might want to avoid offending the other. Intentional ambiguity plays an important role in other social interactions like dating or friendship-making. Correct use of ambiguity protects feelings, demonstrates subtlety and good judgement, and avoids non-productive conflict. In artistic expression too, ambiguity is often intentional or even necessary to the effectiveness of the work. Consider a poem like "My Papa's Waltz" [1]. Does it describe happy memories of the narrator's father, or dark memories of childhood abuse [2]? Can it describe both? Is there something in between? The ambiguity isn't a byproduct of imprecise language. The ambiguity is the meaning. To resolve it is to remove the point of the work. The poem cannot be effectively communicated in any medium that does not allow for the existence of ambiguity. [1] http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172103 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172103 [2] 'Yet, this poem has an intriguing ambiguity that elicits startlingly different interpretations. Kennedy calls it a scene of "comedy" and "persistent love", and Balakian, in part, labels it a "comic romp" (62). In contrast, Ciardi sees it as a "poem of terror"' - from http://www.mrbauld.com/exrthkwtz.html http://www.mrbauld.com/exrthkwtz.html
lawlessone 12y ago
Any font files for this? would be interesting to use.
stuaxo 12y ago
If there was a site that summarised New Yorker articles in 2 pages I would be there in a flash.
- Fastidious 12y ago
  That would be atrocious! You need to flavour and enjoy the reading, just the same you enjoy a nice drink, or a good cup of coffee, or you take the time to make coitus a never-ending engagement. Just enjoy it.
  - StavrosK 12y ago
    Sometimes I need a quick snack, for the calories.
    - krisgee 12y ago
      To be fair there are lots of "snack food" articles around these days but few three course meals. I try to appreciate the long form articles that I find interesting for what they are.
- JohnTHaller 12y ago
  You can't say that on Hacker News. The downvote brigade will nail you every time for disagreeing with them. You can not comment on the verbosity of articles or unrelated extra paragraphs and asides that don't serve the overall narrative in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, etc.
StavrosK 12y ago
TFA: > A sentence like “On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point” becomes simply “Tram-mļöi hhâsmařpţuktôx.” Wikipedia: > Romanization: Oumpeá äx’ääļuktëx. > Translation: "On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point."
mariusz79 12y ago
While it looks like it's an impossible language to use in every day, I'm wondering if it could be used for science and technology. Just imagine having all scientific papers in it :)
thisjepisje 12y ago
Off topic: Are the drop caps supposed to be lower than the line of text to which they belong? It looks kind of silly IMO.
alxndr 12y ago
I'm amazed that the article doesn't mention Lojban at all.
pohl 12y ago
I really enjoyed this article when it was new. Not long ago, when I was learning Octopress, my first post was Hello World in Rust and Ithkuil. (I just wanted to make sure code formatting was working.) I have no idea how correct the translation is. I just googled around until I found someone else's. http://screaming.org/blog/2014/07/12/ettawil-cutx/ http://screaming.org/blog/2014/07/12/ettawil-cutx/
JoeAltmaier 12y ago
"Among the Wakashan Indians of the Pacific Northwest, a grammatically correct sentence can’t be formed without providing what linguists refer to as “evidentiality,” inflecting the verb to indicate whether you are speaking from direct experience, inference, conjecture, or hearsay" This is amazing. But I can't grasp the difference between inference and conjecture - they are both 'figuring out' what happened rather than knowing or hearing?

272 points by godarderik 12y ago

Ithkuil seems like what a language should be: as the article said, it is both precise and concise. It looks the way Esperanto ought to have looked. I find Quijada's effort deeply impressive. I don't know much about designing human languages, but I know how hard it is to design a decent programming language (see http://colinm.org/language_checklist.html http://colinm.org/language_checklist.html), and building a serious human language seems orders of magnitude more difficult. I've never seen an attempt that really intrigued me until I found Ithkuil.

hackerboos 12y ago
I remember a criticism of Esperanto was that it was too similar to Europeans languages. I read about a language that was similar to Esperanto but incorporated Chinese and Arabic qualities. Does anybody know this?
- andreasvc 12y ago
  It's really only the vocabulary which takes from European languages, because the grammar is schematic, very regular and simple to learn. Broadly speaking, you have two options: 1) you select a specific group (e.g., European languages) and sample from their vocabulary. 2) you sample from ALL the world's languages, or generate completely random words (effectively just as hard to learn). In the first case you have privileged one group, but in the second everyone loses ... In the second case you create an additional barrier because there is a large amount of new vocabulary that everyone has to learn, while in the other anyone who doesn't know European languages will have to learn some of its vocabulary, but that might be useful to them anyway, so it clearly seems like the better option to me.
rodgerd 12y ago
> Ithkuil seems like what a language should be: as the article said, it is both precise and concise. Language should be useful and expressive for its users. Human languages designed by the kind of people who prize simplicity and regularity above all other qualities tend to fail for much the same reason programming language designers are hurt and disappointed to discover C is still popular.
- yepguy 12y ago
  Ithkuil is not simple. It's so ridiculously complex that it is just not possible for anyone to learn to speak fluently. It never stood any chance of being adopted in the way Esperanto has. I'm surprised that it found any use at all, but people without linguistics training seem to find it useful for discovering nuances in their own languages that they hadn't considered.
  - dunmalg 12y ago
    >people without linguistics training seem to find it useful for discovering nuances in their own languages that they hadn't considered. Learning any foreign language will tend to do that, though. It's a function of being forced to consider your native tongue as a language, rather than just speaking it. Plus if you learn a foreign language, you will have the advantage of being able to talk to an established base of people who speak it.
    - yepguy 12y ago
      Yes but Ithkuil is a bit unique in that it decided to include as many grammatical distinctions as possible.
abruzzi 12y ago
>Ithkuil seems like what a language should be: as the article said, it is both precise and concise. Which is good for scientists and logicians, but would probably be an issue for novelists and poets. Exploiting ambiguity is a common feature of the arts.
canjobear 12y ago
Given that you're communicating to an agent who can use context for disambiguation, all efficient languages will be ambiguous. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027711002496 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027711... (Sorry for the paywall...) So maybe Ithkuil isn't what a language should be after all. And maybe that's why no natural language looks like it...
- induscreep 12y ago
  So basically language decoding is multimodal like one of the other comments here said? Like in digital communication, perfect decoding needs appropriate SNR (context) in addition to optimal spectral efficiency (conciseness/preciseness of the language). Interesting research.
Steko 12y ago
58 different phonemes means the language is just substituting one form of complexity for another. And apq’uxasiu for 'gawk' doesn't strike me as a particularly huge win for conciseness.
- ZoFreX 12y ago
  > And apq’uxasiu for 'gawk' doesn't strike me as a particularly huge win for conciseness. It seems like it's missing the linguistic equivalent of huffman coding: make frequently used things shorter. Also, it's hardly concise with respect to time if you have to spend 30 minutes consulting a dictionary to utter a single sentence.
  - kazagistar 12y ago
    The huffman coding strategy relies too much on culture to remain properly useful over different groups and time.
smsm42 12y ago
Language should not be concise. Redundancy is built into the language for a reason - language communication is extremely noisy and if there's two-bit-error distance between "I love you" and "I killed and ate your dog" then the usage of this language by humans would not be comfortable. Moreover, people communicating are imperfect. So if you have a language which is very precise and concise, you would have to spend a lot of effort to find a word or set of words which exactly expresses your meaning (in programming, we call it design when we do it upfront, and debugging when we do it post factum) and communication would be a very complex exercise. However, if you have a lot of words which mean roughly the same, you can be sure the meaning is passed through even if the words are not chosen super-carefully.
- RVuRnvbM2e 12y ago
  It's hard to overstate the importance of redundancy in natural languages. This is the whole reason we are able to make ourselves understood in a noisy, imprecise world. Even if you miss a few syllables - or even half a sentence, you can usually piece together what the other person was trying to say. Imagine someone technology-illiterate trying to describe a problem they're having with their computer in this language. Impossible.
  - danieldk 12y ago
    It's hard to overstate the importance of redundancy in natural languages. There are other factors at play, such that speech perception is multi-modal. E.g. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGurk_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGurk_effect
- laichzeit0 12y ago
  In some languages the meaning of a word is highly dependent on the pitch accent, like ancient Greek. If you're 1 bit off you have trouble :) Surprising enough I read an example of this yesterday evening: "Hegelochus, the actor in Euripides' Orestes, which was presented in 408 BC, in line 279 of the play, instead of "after the storm I see again a calm sea" (galeén' horoo), Hegelochus recited "after the storm I see again a weasel" (galeên horoo)."
andreasvc 12y ago
Esperanto was designed first and foremost to be learnable, it seems to be quite successful in this regard whereas it's not a strong point of Ikthuil (as it wasn't a priority). With "ought to have looked", do you mean in your own opinion, or are you referring to some of Esperanto's original goals? I always got the impression that learnability and ease of use were bigger priorities. Personally, I don't have much faith in the idea that you can make people's communication more precise and concise by designing the language in a certain way, just as I don't think that politically correct language leads to meaningful change. This is simply because I don't believe than language can drastically change the way people think (linguistic determinism, strong Whorfianism). Esperanto is very similar to natural languages in its (im)precision, which might just be the level where humans naturally converge to if left to their own devices.

tomkinstinch 12y ago

The same thing happened to Blissymbols[1], as documented by radiolab[2]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols 2. http://www.radiolab.org/story/257194-man-became-bliss/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/257194-man-became-bliss/

MBCook 12y ago
That was a great episode. This has also happened with the language Lojban[1], which was 'forked' from Loglan[2] when the creator starting making copyright complaints so the community could maintain control. Such an odd concept that someone could 'own' a language, but I guess if you created it I can see why you would want to. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan
- GeneralMayhem 12y ago
  It's a less odd concept if you compare it to Elvish rather than English.
- mchaver 12y ago
  I think it's a great lesson for any creator. Just because you have invented something does not necessarily mean you have the right or are capable of dictating how people use it. I seem to remember Umberto Eco mentioning that he does not offer his own interpretations of his novels for a similar reason, but I can't find the quote.
  - Uncompetative 12y ago
    I can recommend his book. The Search for the Perfect Language - Umberto Eco - 2010

tokenadult 12y ago

This is attracting some reader interest here, so I should probably mention, for other Hacker News participants deeply interested in human languages, a definitive analysis of Esperanto[1] explaining why Esperanto has not caught on with more speakers. [1] http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/ http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/

ketralnis 12y ago
I don't think that explains anything; it looks like a list of aesthetic "faults" that the author finds, unlikely to be recognised by anyone without a degree in linguistics. Surely those faults exist, but it's a stretch to pretend that they alone explain anything. I speak some Esperanto but I'm no zealot. The "explanation" that your neighbours don't speak Esperanto, if such a simplified thing can exist, is probably as simple as network effects. I can learn German and speak to the man next-door, or I can learn Esperanto and speak to some theoretical people that may exist somewhere but I don't know them and they are mostly a bunch of nerds that meet at the local co-op to speak in Esperanto mostly about how great Esperanto is. Go ahead. Ask your neighbour why he doesn't speak Esperanto. Does he say " The 'basic' number‐terms tri, trio, tria ('three, threesome, third') are a crowded jumble, making a mockery of the regular root/noun/adjective pattern they imitate" (K5 in the article)? Or does he say "what's that?"?
- Pamar 12y ago
  Agreed: studying Esperanto now makes as much sense as striving to provide CP/M compatibility in your product.
  - ketralnis 12y ago
    Please don't put words in my mouth, I don't think you agree with me at all. I think Esperanto is a fun hobby and I have fun toying with it every few years, even if I'm under no delusion that it's a practical way to, say, do international business. I do think that if it or any universal second language (French, English, Mandarin, whatever) were to suddenly become more widespread, the world would be better off. My claim was only that the reason that it's not more widespread has nothing to do with subjective flaws in the language itself.

wyager 12y ago

Can someone list a few popular constructed languages (maybe comparing them to programming languages)? I'd only heard of Lojban and Esperanto before reading this.

doublec 12y ago
Try http://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs http://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs for discussion and lists of languages. There are many subreddits for specific languages. For example, Toki Pona [1] and Lojban [2]. [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/tokipona http://www.reddit.com/r/tokipona [2] http://www.reddit.com/r/lojban http://www.reddit.com/r/lojban
mchaver 12y ago
Toki Pona is a minimalist language with a bit of a following. It has 120 root words and tries to build all concepts based on those. Loglan is a predecessor and inspiration to Lojban. Slovio is the Slavic version of Esperanto. Dothraki, Elvish (Quenya, Sindarin), Klingon, Na'vi are constructed languages from popular novels/movies.
- dunham 12y ago
  One novel thing about Tolkien's languages: he constructed a root language (like proto-indo-european) and etymologies for them. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Etymologies_(Tolkien) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Etymologies_(Tolkien) )
- iLoch 12y ago
  > Slovio is the Slavic version of Esperanto. Someone doesn't understand the point of Esperanto.
  - mchaver 12y ago
    Regardless of the point, the truth is Esperanto's lexicon is mostly inspired by Romance languages whereas Slovio's lexicon is mostly inspired by Slavic languages. It's not that shocking of a comparison.

selimthegrim 12y ago

Two things struck me about this article in hindsight when I read it. -- Whose pot did the Croats, Bosnians and Slovenes piss in to not make it into this super Slavic union? -- China Mieville wrote a book[0] along very similar thought lines which won the Locus Award. Also, Garkavenko appears not to have taken the obvious side [1] in Ukraine's present conflict given how he is described in Foer's article [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embassytown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embassytown [1] http://maidantranslations.com/2014/06/24/russian-volunteers-returning-home-from-donbas-will-bring-the-deadly-maidan-virus-to-russia/ http://maidantranslations.com/2014/06/24/russian-volunteers-...

lotsofmangos 12y ago

I wonder how well Ithkuil can be represented in Ian Banks' Marain script. http://trevor-hopkins.com/banks/a-few-notes-on-marain.html http://trevor-hopkins.com/banks/a-few-notes-on-marain.html

gamegoblin 12y ago
Ithkuil has well over double the number of phonemes as Marain, so the answer would probably be "not so well".
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  Rotation and reflection of the basic set extend the phonemes and can link together similar sounding ones in Marain, so I would have thought it would be achievable.

jqm 12y ago

Losing control of a language seems to be standard procedure. If this invented language were to catch on, it likely wouldn't be a generation or two and kids who grew up speaking it would start saying the Ithkuil equivalent of things like "yo dog, that's the rad shizaz!". Then, several generations thereafter grandmothers would be regularly using the word "shizaz" and they would have to put it in the dictionary. That's just the way it goes and is probably the reason we don't all speak the same language in the first place. That being said, I've always been fascinated by the idea of a systematically created universal language and think the world would be much better place with one....if that were possible. This was a neat article.

Terr_ 12y ago

I think there's some research out there that suggests all natural languages have about the same information density, when you factor how two people in conversation will add error-correction or extra context to frame an idea. IMO this suggests the bottleneck is something about our brains on a biological rather than linguistic level.

micro_cam 12y ago
i think it is more auditory and has to do with out ability to error correct. Actually there is a really fascinating section in james gleick's "the information" on African drum communication which is essentially a much less dense version of spoken language since you say everything using a long sentence which essentially reduces the possibility of it being misinterpreted despite most of the sounds of normal spoken language are missing. Not sure if more scholarly work supports this idea but if this is the case then a written or thought language could certainly be denser...like symbolic algebra or python.
godarderik 12y ago
According to a study published several years ago, mainstream languages seem to operate on an information density/speed tradeoff [1].The authors found that languages that are spoken faster seem to encode less information per syllable than those uttered at a slower pace. This does seem to suggest that biology may be the limiting role in controlling the rate at which humans convey information. Indeed, the language mentioned in the article seems almost laughably cryptic and dense. However, I feel that the limitation of the mentioned study results from the fact that it treats information on a relatively limiting per syllable basis. Quijada seems to suggest that an artificially constructed language has the ability to incorporate all the implicit meanings of a phrase that are left unsaid in normal conversation. Ultimately, while Quijada's project seems quite unlikely to catch on among those who are not fringe pseudoscientists, it poses interesting philosophical questions about the nature of speech and communication and perhaps earns its title as a "conceptual-art project." [1] http://rosettaproject.org/blog/02012/mar/1/language-speed-vs-density/ http://rosettaproject.org/blog/02012/mar/1/language-speed-vs...
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voronoff 12y ago

For anyone who is interested in what an ideal language would look like, particularly in respect to brevity vs. informativeness I'd highly suggest looking into Terry Regier's work: http://lclab.berkeley.edu/ http://lclab.berkeley.edu/ I worked in his lab on one of many projects showing that most human languages use a near optimal trade-off in various semantic domains (so far - color, kinship, containers, and spatial relations). His work also includes some of the best evidence for some language dependent forces in cognition interacting with some universal ones.

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ilaksh 12y ago

Ithkuil is definitely one of the most amazing pieces of work I have ever come across. I having been using the name as my email address for many years and another variant of it he had called 'ilaksh' as my screen name (note I didn't have anything to do with the creation of ithkuil/ilaksh, just a fan). I think not only other conlangers but also anyone interested in fields like linguistics, computer programming, knowledge representation, etc. can be inspired by what Quijada did. I did get a few somewhat weird emails that I think were in Russian some years ago, but I think they figured out pretty quick that it wasn't the right email address to reach Quijada.

sbussard 12y ago

another hacker news TL;DR article

knieveltech 12y ago
Too bad. It's a pretty good read.
- JohnTHaller 12y ago
  It's a very interesting article. But it's done in old journalism/academic paper style where it takes 5 pages to get to the point and has huge multiparagraph asides that the reader is often uninterested in. I already know the history of esperanto... most people won't even care about it. I don't care at all that George Soros learned it as his first language, it's unrelated nonsense. Tell me about the topic of the article. If you want interested people to be able to learn more about Esperanto, link to a side article. We can do this today.
  - Uncompetative 12y ago
    Infodump

godarderik 12y ago

Reading this story brings to mind the history of algorithms in the field of machine translation. Early attempts at the problem attempted to explicitly define the rules of converting between tongues using meticulously laid out systems of vocabulary and syntax. This approach proved untenable, in part due to the complex and ever changing nature of language. Modern systems such as Google Translation make use of machine learning algorithms that are fed large amounts of source material and computationally discern relationships between them. I wonder if a similar approach could be taken with language construction. Instead of spending 25+ years fleshing out the details of a language in painstaking detail, computer programs could be devised that, using large amounts input, determine the most "efficient" means of expressing information. The approach would not only be far less labor intensive, it could also accommodate the rapidly evolving nature of language, for example adding to its "dictionary" in response to new phenomena in need of naming.

mchaver 12y ago
It sounds like an experiment worth testing out and could lead to some interesting results. On the other hand, I am imagine most conlangers enjoy devising the details of their language.
erikb 12y ago
In fact it doesn't just sound like an experiment worth doing. It sounds like something that somebody somewhere might have already done.
- voronoff 12y ago
  To be glib, it has been done. We call it language. Seriously, though, take a look at the link I posted in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8180924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8180924 One of the techniques used is to computationally create a space of possible ways to partition semantic domains on a plane whose dimensions are simplicity and informativeness, in order to look at where in the possible space it is that real languages lie. While it's not been done (to my knowledge) for a whole language, it's potential direction to go.
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arsalanb 12y ago

>"Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process..." I'm in awe of the creator of Any language. Because to create a (Good) language isn't easy. This is true or both programming languages and otherwise. However, it comes without saying that adoption is a vital component of any language, and with mass adoption comes evolution. People will often make changes in languages, make their own dialects (based on things perhaps the can relate to on a deeper level, etc..). This isn't a bad thing. To me it only signifies growth and expansion of the language. +1

yongjik 12y ago

That was an interesting read, but the reporter's breathless assertions frequently got in the way of appreciating Quijada and his idea. I mean, things like: > A sentence like “On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point” becomes simply “Tram-mļöi hhâsmařpţuktôx.” Simply? We could have used LZW algorithm and the sentence could probably become even shorter, just a "simple" sequence of random-ish bytes. If you increase the number of allowed symbols, of course you need less symbols to convey the same information. If you allow for a limitless set of words that are dynamically generated from combining many roots, of course the number of words decreases... sometimes down to 1, as in polysynthetic languages. This is Information Theory 101.

moconnor 12y ago
The English text is 97 ASCII encoded bytes. Compressed with zlib: 86 bytes. Compressed with lzma: 98 bytes. The Ithkuil representation is just 30 UTF-8 encoded bytes. Compressed with zlib: 39 bytes. Compressed with lzma: 47 bytes. (Measured using python's zlib/pylmza modules to avoid e.g. file header overhead) It's hard to achieve this kind of compression without an external dictionary. What Quijada has created with Ithkuil is, in part, a dictionary for the space of human thought and concepts, something I wouldn't have expected to work in the way the article describes it.
- Dylan16807 12y ago
  Actually, using zlib format gets you an unnecessary 2 byte header and 4 byte footer, so the proper sizes are 80 and 33. I'm having trouble figuring out what's going on with lzma because the spec is lying about the header, so I won't attempt to guess the correct number there.

based2 12y ago

http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/2dlsgl/utopian_for_beginners http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/2dlsgl/utopian_...

QuantumGood 12y ago

Seems this could contribute to accelerating artificial intelligence towards the possibility of the singularity.

ejr 12y ago

If anyone wants to hear what Ithkuil sounds like : https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Ithkuil_pull_uiqisx.ogg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Ithkuil_... From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil

lloeki 12y ago
> Ithkuil does not use the concept of zero Interesting. How is one supposed to talk about math without a concept of zero?
- hrvbr 12y ago
  It's likely not missing the concept of zero but rather the symbol in the numbering system. The 0 is not necessary for representing integers (if there's a new symbol for 10). I'm pretty sure it is necessary to write the decimal part of a real number.
- ejr 12y ago
  It's a fascinating problem. It makes me wonder, without zero, what paths mathematics would have taken. There have been civilisations that used math extensively without zero and I hope Ithkuil-fluent mathematicians some day would continue exploring this.
  - csirac2 12y ago
    "Zero: The Bibliography of a dangerous idea" was quite a memorable book for me, and goes into some good detail on those very points - even trying to guesstimate just how damage to progress of civilization by the numerous rejections of zero at several points in our early history. http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Zero.html?id=obJ70nxVYFUC&redir_esc=y http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Zero.html?id=obJ70nxV...
SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
Oh gods! It sounds like a tongue-twister played backwards. Clearly not designed for ease of pronunciation or for singing songs.

gabemart 12y ago

I found this article fascinating and satisfying. I'm curious about the desire to reduce ambiguity, which seemed to be emphasized as a motivation for the creation of Ithkuil and some of the other languages mentioned. Is it desirable to completely eliminate ambiguity? I can see why it would be desirable in a scientific paper or a public political debate. But in everyday interactions, (intentional) ambiguity plays many important roles. In my experience, politeness is bolstered by some level of ambiguity. Rather than explicitly state your needs, desires or opinions, you imply them at some level of abstraction, allowing other participants in the conversation to accept or decline more easily. Imagine Jessica who has brought two friends who don't know each other to see a play. They chit-chat a little afterwards, then Jessica goes home early leaving two virtual strangers to have a drink together. It's not hard to imagine the conversation going like this: A: "Did you enjoy the play?" B: "It was very interesting. I thought the stage dressing was a little unconventional." A: "Yes, I noticed that too. Very creative. I was intrigued by the style of the narration. It really let the audience write the story for themselves." B: "It certainly didn't constrain the imagination did it? I couldn't help noticing that many of the actors took a somewhat avant-garde interpretation of the source material." A: "Yes, as if they didn't want it to seem like they were 'acting', so to speak?" B: It was awful wasn't it!? A: Thank god! Yes, worst thing I've ever seen! Ambiguity allows subtle social cues (not so subtle in my example!) that avoid direct confrontation when it might be uncomfortable. If one person loved the play and the other hated it, they each might want to avoid offending the other. Intentional ambiguity plays an important role in other social interactions like dating or friendship-making. Correct use of ambiguity protects feelings, demonstrates subtlety and good judgement, and avoids non-productive conflict. In artistic expression too, ambiguity is often intentional or even necessary to the effectiveness of the work. Consider a poem like "My Papa's Waltz" [1]. Does it describe happy memories of the narrator's father, or dark memories of childhood abuse [2]? Can it describe both? Is there something in between? The ambiguity isn't a byproduct of imprecise language. The ambiguity is the meaning. To resolve it is to remove the point of the work. The poem cannot be effectively communicated in any medium that does not allow for the existence of ambiguity. [1] http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172103 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172103 [2] 'Yet, this poem has an intriguing ambiguity that elicits startlingly different interpretations. Kennedy calls it a scene of "comedy" and "persistent love", and Balakian, in part, labels it a "comic romp" (62). In contrast, Ciardi sees it as a "poem of terror"' - from http://www.mrbauld.com/exrthkwtz.html http://www.mrbauld.com/exrthkwtz.html

lawlessone 12y ago

Any font files for this? would be interesting to use.

stuaxo 12y ago

If there was a site that summarised New Yorker articles in 2 pages I would be there in a flash.

Fastidious 12y ago
That would be atrocious! You need to flavour and enjoy the reading, just the same you enjoy a nice drink, or a good cup of coffee, or you take the time to make coitus a never-ending engagement. Just enjoy it.
- StavrosK 12y ago
  Sometimes I need a quick snack, for the calories.
  - krisgee 12y ago
    To be fair there are lots of "snack food" articles around these days but few three course meals. I try to appreciate the long form articles that I find interesting for what they are.
JohnTHaller 12y ago
You can't say that on Hacker News. The downvote brigade will nail you every time for disagreeing with them. You can not comment on the verbosity of articles or unrelated extra paragraphs and asides that don't serve the overall narrative in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, etc.

StavrosK 12y ago

TFA: > A sentence like “On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point” becomes simply “Tram-mļöi hhâsmařpţuktôx.” Wikipedia: > Romanization: Oumpeá äx’ääļuktëx. > Translation: "On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point."

mariusz79 12y ago

While it looks like it's an impossible language to use in every day, I'm wondering if it could be used for science and technology. Just imagine having all scientific papers in it :)

thisjepisje 12y ago

Off topic: Are the drop caps supposed to be lower than the line of text to which they belong? It looks kind of silly IMO.

alxndr 12y ago

I'm amazed that the article doesn't mention Lojban at all.

pohl 12y ago

I really enjoyed this article when it was new. Not long ago, when I was learning Octopress, my first post was Hello World in Rust and Ithkuil. (I just wanted to make sure code formatting was working.) I have no idea how correct the translation is. I just googled around until I found someone else's. http://screaming.org/blog/2014/07/12/ettawil-cutx/ http://screaming.org/blog/2014/07/12/ettawil-cutx/

JoeAltmaier 12y ago

"Among the Wakashan Indians of the Pacific Northwest, a grammatically correct sentence can’t be formed without providing what linguists refer to as “evidentiality,” inflecting the verb to indicate whether you are speaking from direct experience, inference, conjecture, or hearsay" This is amazing. But I can't grasp the difference between inference and conjecture - they are both 'figuring out' what happened rather than knowing or hearing?