Ithkuil: A Philosophical Design for a Hypothetical Language
ithkuil.net
ithkuil.net
It was a painfully long wait for the lyrics to start, though. Half of me wanted to listen to the awesome intro, and the other half just wanted to hear some damned Ithkuil. The former half won by small margin.
I wonder if that would hold up with this language as well - if it is so concise and precise, would it just mean that people take a while to speak it, and take a while to understand it after hearing it, before responding? Or is it possible that it's more Neo-in-the-matrix like where we'd immediately understand some complex idea right when it is uttered? I believe the former would be more likely but have no idea.
bakimliliastiramadiklarimizdanmisiniz?
It's a single word. It means: Are you one of those people who we tried to convert to take care of themselves better but failed to do so?
The language proposed reminds me in some ways to Turkish :)
Turkish: 16 English: 26
Given the inherent loss in efficiency in trying to accurately translate very specific phrases out of context, that doesn't seem like such a big difference. (And I'm sure you could further condense the translation maybe like "Are you one of them we failed to get to take better care of themselves?" at 18.)
I think the OP's assertion is generally assumed to hold for natural languages.
This sounds to me like formal scientific discourse: extremely concise and precise, but it takes a while to package one's thoughts in that form, and to unpack someone else's. That is to say, I think that your question is great, and that this possibility is probably what would happen (… or happens, I guess?).
That assumes that anyone actually could come sufficiently close to speaking it, of course; it seems similarly unlikely that speakers could express so many distinct phonemes sufficiently clearly when the total complexity is so far beyond current languages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babel-17
In the story, it's described as a language which forces clear thought, while secretly also forcing a change of beliefs.
But then I realized it's main features aren't clarity and precision. But instead it's a just another way of mapping human mental models to encoders and decoders. Speech and script on to ears and mouths and eyes.
Machines will have fundentally different mental models of meaning and also be able to create any encoder decoder pair to suit any range of sensors and actuators.
Machines could have a language in light, 3d printed objects could be scripts. A sculpture could literally be art and treatise at the same time.
Ambiguity in this context means you can derive some information but not as much as if it were precise.
"The weather is stormy" doesn't give you information about whether you need snowshoes or rainboots.
It's very possible that conlangs like Lojban and Ithkuil still contain concepts about storms that don't require a speaker to indicate what kind of precipitation the storm produced.
mlatu = x1 (entity) is a cat of species x2 (taxon) As a noun: lo mlatu — cat.
carvi = x1 (entity) rains or showers to x2 (entity) from x3 (entity) As a noun: lo carvi — rain. lo te carvi — rain cloud.
simxu = x1 (entity group) mutually do x2 (relation between members of x1, contains two places for [ce'u]) As a noun: lo se simxu — done mutually.
cnemu = x1 (entity) rewards x2 (entity) for atypical x3 (property of x2) with x4 (entity, property of x1) As a noun: lo cnemu — rewarder. lo se cnemu — rewardee. lo te cnemu — reason for a reward. lo ve cnemu — reward.
Especially the way modifiers are used, this reminds me more of the APL/J family of languages. Start off with words (verbs and such in those languages) and allow for modifiers (adverbs) that alter their behavior and meaning (sometimes significantly, while still retaining the core concept of the root verb).
As examples: Esperanto tries very hard to be precise, but there are playful neologisms, like "gedormi", which conjugates "dormi", "to sleep", in the mixed-gender plural, to form "to sleep with (heterosexually)", with the same innuendo as in English.
In Lojban, there is an abundance of poetry in which pieces of the phrases are intentionally and visibly omitted, which allows for flexible interpretation of created ambiguity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona
Toki pona is another constructed language, but it is focused in minimalism and being easy to learn. Despite the minimalism you can express many things with it.
I would not use it for technological things though, since technological concepts require to start being creative with neologisms that can be hard to get.
These languages begin with the notion that if the perfect language does not exist, we must start over entirely. The very act of starting over prevents any previous works from catching on.
I wonder what study has been done so far about specific linguistic paradigms that would be comparable to study about programming language paradigms like procedural vs functional, etc.
Very briefly, lojban was conceived as a scientific experiment and tries to re-build the structure of language from the ground up, based on logical foundations with little or no connection to natural languages; the lexicon, however, is derived algorithmically from natural languages, and there is no particular emphasis on concision. Ithkuil, on the other hand, is much more of an artistic project, which makes use of the same basic mechanisms exhibited by natural languages but takes them to extremes in the pursuit of both precision and concision, and has an a-priori vocabulary.
Lojban is generally classified as a loglang and an engelang, while Ithkuil is generally classified as an engelang and an artlang.
The next most similar conlang to Ithkuil that I know of (and purely in my opinion) would be Latejami by Rick Morneau. Latejami is designed as an interlanguage for translation, and thus doesn't care much about concision (partly because it's mostly supposed to be used by machines, not humans) but does aim to be able to accurately represent any semantic structure that exists in any natlang, and goes to great lengths to systematize its semantics in ways similar to Ithkuil.