Ithkuil

File:Ithkuil script.gif

A phrase in Ithkuil, rendered in native script.

Pronunciation: /oum.pɛ.a æ.x’æ.æ.ɬʊk.tɤx/ .

Translation: “On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point.”

Ithkuil (Iţkuîl) is an outstandingly complicated human language constructed by the American linguist John Quijada between 1978 and 2004.

The author presents Ithkuil as a cross between an a priori philosophical language and a logical language. Quijada admitted his creation to be a language too complex and rational to have developed “naturally” (meaning the manner in which most cultural languages have done), yet a one usable for general conversation and literature. No person is hitherto known to be able to speak Ithkuil; Quijada, for one, does not: “I don't speak Ithkuil, never have, never will, never claimed to.”.

Ithkuil is designed to convey much meaning with fewer, shorter words than naturally evolved languages would require. The many examples from Quijada’s original grammar show that, in the general case, a message would take significantly longer to express in a natural language than in Ithkuil. Besides, the language aims to express deeper levels of human cognition more overtly, and to eschew vagueness and ambiguity found in natural human languages.

Grammar and lexicon

The lexicon of Ithkuil potentially consists of 3,600 word roots; so far only about a thousand are assigned with definite meanings. Each root consists of 2 consonant radicals, and can derive an enormous number of possible lexemes. This is made possible by Ithkuil’s complex rules of morphophonology, which involve both consonantal and vocal mutation, shifts in syllabic stress and tone, and many different kinds of affixes, including prefixes, suffixes, infixes and interfixes.

An example of Ithkuil’s morphology at work

(based entirely on the original Ithkuil grammar book)

The word iţkuîl is a formative derived from the root k-l (abstractly meaning “speech, voice, interpretation”) through the addition of several morphological determinants:

• The -u- vocalic infix

  kul is the holistic variety of the Stem 2 of the three other possible stems from k-l. Translating roughly as “a meaningful unit of speech,” i. e. “a word”, it gives no emphasis on the meaning or the vocal rendering of the word.

• The u → uî mutation of the infix

  Secondary, as opposed to Primary, Mode, means that the word kuîl refers not to a real-life phenomenon, but rather to a mental entity representing that phenomenon; to an imaginary or hypothetical object. Thus “a made-up word”.

• A Grade 8 mutation of the first radical consonant: k → ţk

  The Configuration of the term is Composite. Roughly corresponding to the plurality concept in Indo-European languages, it additionally implies the objects in question (words, kuîl) to differ from each other, and to form a “coherent emergent entity” (as opposed to being just a collection or an array of different words), hence meaning “a vocabulary/lexicon”.

• The i- vocalic prefix, one of the 24 possible for formative roots

  The Extension is Delimitive, meaning that “the vocabulary” is conceived entirely, with clearly distinguished boundaries, as opposed to it being just a local manifestation — e. g. a slang/jargon/style of a particular group that uses the language.

  The Affiliation of the set of objects in question is Coalescent. This indicates that the individual members of the set act together towards a higher purpose by coōrdinating each other’s complementary functions. Thus, “a vocabulary/lexicon” becomes “a language”.

• Syllabic stress on the penultimate syllable (-u-)

  The Perspective of the noun is Monadic, meaning that “the language” is viewed as a single and specific entity, rather than a many languages existing separately, the general phenomenon of language (“human languages”), or the abstract idea of “languageness”, “anything to do with languages”.

Thus, the translation of iţkuîl is approximately “an idea/fantasy of a complete purposeful system of complementary speech elements”, or simply “an imaginary language”.

Phonology

Ithkuil’s phonological system of 65 consonants and 17 vowels is based on sounds from a variety of languages, including such as Chechen or Abkhaz. It is often difficult for a monolingual speaker to pronounce, or even to distinguish, some of the sounds. The consonants of Ithkuil are as follows:

	labial	dental	alveolar	retroflex	postalveolar	palatal	velar	uvular	pharyngeal	glottal
stop	p b pʰ p'	t d tʰ t'				c ɟ cʰ c'	k g kʰ k'	q ɢ qʰ q'		ʔ
affricate			ʦ ʣ ʦʰ ʦ'	tʂ dʐ tʂʰ tʂ'	ʧ ʤ ʧʰ ʧ'	cç'	kx'	qχ'
fricative	f v	θ ð	s z	ʂ ʐ	ʃ ʒ	ç ʝ	x ɣ	χ	ħ	h
nasal	m	n					ŋ
flap			ɾ
lateral			l ɫ ɬ tɬʰ	ɭ
approximant	w					j		ʁ̞

/m n ŋ l ɫ ɭ/ can be syllabic. /h/ is pronounced [ɸ] when preceded by a vowel and followed by another consonant. /tɬʰ/ is in free variation with [tɬ']; the latter is more common at the beginning of a word. All consonants except /j w/ can be geminated; when geminated, /h/ is pronounced as a bidental fricative and /ɾ/ is prounounced as an alveolar trill.

The vowels of Ithkuil are as follows:

	front	central	back
close	i y	ʉ	ɯ u
near-close	ɪ		ʊ
close-mid	e ø		ɤ o
open-mid	ɛ œ		ɔ
open	æ	a	ɑ

The diphthongs in Ithkuil are /ai æi ei ɤi øi oi ʊi au æu eu ɤu ɪu ou øu aɯ eɯ ɤɯ ʊɯ oɯ ɪɯ æɯ øɯ ʉɯ ae/. All other sequences of vowels are pronounced as separate syllables.

Possible advantages

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis assumes that the language that a person speaks affects their way of thinking. In the Russian popular-scientific magazine Computerra, Stanislav Kozlovsky proposed 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, also have a clearer and deeper understanding of both real-world phenomena and abstract philosophical categories.

Along these lines, Kozlovsky likened Ithkuil to the fictional Speedtalk from Robert A. Heinlein’s novel Gulf, and contradistinguished these two languages from Newspeak of the dull, cultureless society of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Ithkuil is by far the most complete language of the three. John Quijada acknowledged the similarity of Ithkuil to Speedtalk, “However, 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.”

Ilaksh: the revision of Ithkuil

Since the mentioning of Ithkuil in the Russian magazine Computerra, several Russian-speakers contacted Quijada and expressed interest in learning the language. Quijada has worked out a complete revision of the language's morpho-phonology to reduce the number of phonemes from 82 to 40 in order to make the language easier to pronounce (as requested by several people who claim they want to learn it). The revision was published on 10 June 2007 as Ilaksh. The script has been fully remade in Ilaksh [1], eschewing the sequential, linear writing manner of Ithkuil, or virtually all human languages, for that matter.