One of my favorite examples:
Aistlaţervièllîmļ - skipping an opportunity because it's not ideal, despite the likelihood that an ideal instance will never come
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!