Ithkuil, the Most Complicated Language
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-be...
There are 10k fluent esperanto speakers and an order of magnitude more "active speakers".
According to 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)
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.
Aistlaţervièllîmļ - skipping an opportunity because it's not ideal, despite the likelihood that an ideal instance will never come
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?
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.
Proof?
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!
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).
Imagine there is a concept that no language can express.
Now Ithkuil introduces a new word that is defined as that concept.
But English (and all other languages) still cannot express that concept. So the idea that all/most languages are expressively equivalent appears to be false.
The Chomsky hierarchy is about grammatical expressiveness, not about semantic expressiveness. I see no reason to believe that all languages have the same semantic expressiveness, which is what I understood the above claim to mean.
You are assuming the consequent. How exactly did Ithkuil 'define' a new word as that concept if the concept can't be expressed in Ithkuil ("any language")?
Even assuming you could do such a thing, why couldn't every other language define a word to mean that concept in the same way? Why wouldn't English - in particular - just make the new Ithkuil word also an English word?
Turns out the results didn't replicate though, for a variety of reasons. Even in cases where the source languages didn't have higher numbers (which was much less common than originally thought), the speakers of course had a way of referencing numbers. In at least one case I believe the language had no unique number words at all, and what the linguist had thought was the word for "one" was in fact "alone", and the word for two was "couple" (as in "married couple"), and so on. They did indeed have such figurative words for larger numbers, and a place system for speaking of even larger amounts (e.g. a dozen-dozen people).
The Sapir-Worf hypothesis also falls flat in another way: if we cannot conceive of a concept without a word for it, then how did language develop? Clearly there must be a way to learn a new concept, think about it, and then be the first to coin a new word for it.
The original, strong form of the Sapir-Worf hypothesis is largely discredited today. But not the weak form, which is expressed thusly: "The language we speak influence the ways in which we think." This does seem to be largely true.
There are studies but I'd rather point to some anecdotal examples that illustrate more why I find this interesting. Learning math, critical thinking, and engineering has enabled me to reason much more precisely about things than I did as a teenager. Having been through the community college system, I also have observed the great difficulty a lot of people less interested in scientific thinking have had in adopting various concepts in critical thinking. Like the difference between conditional implication (if) and biconditional statements (if and only if). In everyday English we often say "if", when in fact "if and only if" is the more correct statement. Or we say "A or B" when we mean "A or B, but not both" (exclusive-or).
In English these longer forms are cumbersome, and the other alternative, "if" or "or", are in fact abbreviations of the longer forms "if and only if" and "A or B, but not both". So we decide that the shorter forms can mean either form, and resort to cumbersome language when clarity is required. If I tell you "I wear a hat if it is sunny" and you see me come indoors with my hat on, can you infer that it is sunny outside? No, because I said nothing about what I do when it is cloudy, not sunny outside. Maybe I wear a hat then too. If I had said "I wear a hat if and only if it is sunny" it'd be a different story. But that doesn't feel right because we know that people often shorten "if and only if" to just "if", and so we might feel justified in assuming the speaker meant they wear a hat if and only if it is sunny outside.
But in Lojban, Ithkuil, and Toaq, each truth table possibility is assigned a unique, approximately equal-length and unambiguous word/morpheme to represent it. It's like we coined the word "ba" to mean "if and only if." So the two statements become "I wear a hat if it is sunny" and "I wear a hat ba it is sunny". They are equal length so why wouldn't I pick the one that I mean? Then "if" can go back to meaning "if" exclusively, and never "if and only if".
You might say that people aren't used to making such finely tuned logical distinctions, but that sounds a lot like what a Chinese person might say about conjugating for tense and number in English, or for gender in most other Indo-European languages. Why does a verb change form based on the number of thing, its gender, or whether it happened in the past or future, or was an ongoing activity? And how can you possibly keep this all straight while speaking at fluent speeds? But in fact native speakers of English have no trouble doing so.
Maybe, just maybe, if we all spoke Lojban or Toaq or Ithkuil or whatever, these fine logical and critical thinking distinctions will be as natural to us as the verb changes in "he went", "she goes", or "I will go" are, which any native speaker gets correct without even consciously having to think about it, yet nevertheless confounds learners of English.
Is this true?
The only exception would be things not express able on our semantic models which you might want to say. No one has ever been able to offer up an example of something that couldn’t be represented in a logical formalism, so…
English will simply absorb T and trundle off like the demented lunatic it is. Examples include remuda, schadenfreude, and obi, all of which are copacetic English words after a remarkably short period of time.
When you try to do it in plain English it becomes very hard.
I’m not a fan of Ithkuil actually, as I think it takes it too far. But I do wonder how much clearer our thinking would be if we had a logical / rational language as our mother tongue.
Of course when, a couple of years later, I was taught algebra, I was wondering why I hadn't been told before!
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.
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.
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/
Which mostly cites 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).
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).
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.
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.
I actually think LLMs trained on conlangs is a super cool idea, but you'd need a huge corpus to do that. Kind of a bootstrapping problem.
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.
Also, anecdotally, my inner monologue is sometimes behind my "real" thoughts. I can think faster than I can speak, even in my own head.
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.
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 :)
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/human-speech-may-hav...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Ithkuil_...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.