[This thread was copied here from the old forum.]
Loki 17 August, 2012 - 23:26
Has anyone heard of this language? On wikipedia:
The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis postulates that a person’s language defines their perceptions and cognitive patterns. Stanislav Kozlovsky proposed,[2] in the Russian popular-scientific magazine Computerra, that a fluent speaker of Ithkuil, accordingly, would think “about five or six times as fast” as a speaker of a typical natural language. One may also argue that, Ithkuil being an extremely precise and synthetic language, its speaker would, under the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, have a more discerning, deeper understanding both of everyday situations and of broader phenomena, and of abstract philosophical categories.
Along these lines, Kozlovsky likened Ithkuil to the fictional Speedtalk from Robert A. Heinlein’s novella Gulf, and contrasted both languages with the Newspeak of the communicationally restricted society of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Ithkuil is by far the most complete language of the three.[13] John Quijada acknowledged the similarity of Ithkuil’s design goals to those of Speedtalk,[1] remarking that,
“[h]owever, Heinlein’s Speedtalk appears to focus only on the morpho-phonological component of language[, whereas] Ithkuil has been designed with an equal focus on [morphology, lexico-morphology, or lexico-semantics]. Additionally, the apparent purpose of Heinlein’s language is simple rapidity/brevity of speech and thought, while Ithkuil is focused on maximal communication in the most efficient manner, a somewhat different purpose, in which brevity per se is irrelevant.”
The language’s author, John Quijada, presents Ithkuil[1] as a cross between an a priori philosophical and a logical language designed to express deeper levels of human cognition overtly and clearly, particularly in regard to human categorization, yet briefly. It also strives to minimize the ambiguities and semantic vagueness found in natural human languages.
It’s a constructed language like Esperanto. It also says that it is not spoken fluently by any known people, even the creator, so it wouldn’t really be useful as a communication tool, but I could see it being useful conceptually and possibly in writings only meant to be read by oneself and with memory systems.
I don’t plan on learning it until I have my first few other languages under my belt, and I’m still acquainting myself with mnemonic techniques. Once I get enough practice at learning languages, I will be making an intense project out of this. I thought I’d throw it in here in the mean time on the chance that anyone else is interested, though. It would be neat to be the only known fluent speaker of a language such as this.
Almost forgot to link the site: Here.
Josh 14 September, 2012 - 13:48
Loki wrote:
The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis postulates that a person’s language defines their perceptions and cognitive patterns. Stanislav Kozlovsky proposed,[2] in the Russian popular-scientific magazine Computerra, that a fluent speaker of Ithkuil, accordingly, would think “about five or six times as fast” as a speaker of a typical natural language.
That is very interesting. I’m working on something a little bit related to this, but on a much smaller scale.
In a similar way that data can be compressed and stored a symbols in the memory – for example, a long string of 30 digits like 0001000001011110001000000011011 in my memory system can be encoded by three units (syllables: TOS-KAR-SAAM) – I’m trying to compress entire ideas into basic symbols. The purpose is to expand my thinking beyond words that are available in my vocabulary. I’ll post a full explanation in a blog post soon.
This language was also created to test ideas in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis:
There is an interesting chapter on Lojban in the book Mindhacker.
YeOldeTrolle 6 October, 2012 - 01:57
Hi, I’m new here, but since I’ve been following Ithkuil for a couple of years, I thought I might share a few points.
That Ithkuil is not spoken fluently by anyone is a bit of a understatement - the creator takes about 15 minutes to string basic sentences together, after referring to the necessary documentation! Ithkuil is ridiculously hard - not for the sake of being hard, of course - but when one can say a few words corresponding to paragraphs of written English, of course it will be extremely difficult. Aside from conciseness, though, it can also be used to formulate extremely abstract ideas (for which Lojban is, as far as I have heard, is less useful for).
In John Quijada’s (the linguist who created the language) words:
“…an idealized language whose aim is the highest possible degree of logic, efficiency, detail, and accuracy in cognitive expression via spoken human language, while minimizing the ambiguity, vagueness, illogic, redundancy, polysemy (multiple meanings) and overall arbitrariness that is seemingly ubiquitous in natural human language.”
The cognitive affects on a hypothetical human speaker of Ithkuil would be far reaching and incredible. Not necessarily just at the speed department, but in how the speaker perceived the world. The Ithkuil grammar forces one to think about many different things when constructing a word or sentence. Quijada explains:
“For a Russian or an English-speaker to say “it’s raining” in each other’s language is fairly simple except for the Russian perhaps wondering what the dummy subject “it” represents. But in speaking the Ithkuil equivalent, one must consider how one knows it’s raining (so as to use the correct Validation category), the pattern of the rainfall (so you’ll know what value of the Phase category to use), whether the information is intended to convey a resulting consequence or interpretation on the part of the listener, etc., etc.”
Considering the implications of this upon a hypothetical speaker is mind blowing. Not only would they think faster, but deeper and clearer as well. I guess criminals might want to stay away from any such speakers - they’d make eerily good witnesses ( :bigsmile: ).
Furthermore, when one considers that in Ithkuil, one can ‘create’ words at will from any of the 3600 available word-roots in a similar way a normal human can create sentences at will, it becomes clear just how amazing Ithkuil is. The amount of times those roots can be inflected (to achieve stems), and how those stems can be inflected to form a word or sentence creates an almost infinite amount of permuations.
John Quijada himself is quite skeptical as to whether Ithkuil will ever be learnt:
“That is the purpose of Ithkuil: not to necessarily be learned and spoken, but to be reflected upon and studied for its value as a way of seeing just how much of what is going on at a cognitive level never actually gets expressed in real languages.”
I myself am extremely fascinated by the possibility of learning such a language through the use of mnemonics. Unfortunately, though, the way Quijada has published the language, while ideal for linguists who want to glean roughly how the language functions, is a very poor layout for learning the language. Perhaps if you want to learn it, you may have to make several passes through the website and then reconstruct the layout in a way more appropriate for learning.
Josh 6 October, 2012 - 18:42
YeOldeTrolle wrote:
I myself am extremely fascinated by the possibility of learning such a language through the use of mnemonics. Unfortunately, though, the way Quijada has published the language, while ideal for linguists who want to glean roughly how the language functions, is a very poor layout for learning the language. Perhaps if you want to learn it, you may have to make several passes through the website and then reconstruct the layout in a way more appropriate for learning.
I made a wiki page for it here if people are interested: Mnemonic Techniques for Learning Ithkuil. 
suncover 7 October, 2012 - 22:14
Sounds interesting - I’ll have to take a deeper look at this
Josh 17 December, 2012 - 23:10
Joshua Foer on Ithkuil:
It’s definitely worth reading the article all the way through.
azraelgnosis 30 December, 2012 - 08:57
I’m one of the admins for the Ithkuil group and community page on Facebook. Please join us if you’re interested.
facebook.com/groups/298793876903856/