Ithkuil

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Ithkuil
Project author John Quijada
Year of publication 2004
speaker no
Linguistic
classification
particularities highly complex and complicated, huge inventory of sounds, powerful morphology, only a few hundred lexemes, novel writing
Language codes
ISO 639 -1

-

ISO 639 -2

art (other constructed languages)

Ithkuil or Iţkuîl [ ˈɪθkʊil ] is a constructed language that was developed between 1978 and 2004 by the American John Quijada . According to his own statement, the author developed it as a philosophical a priori language that is heavily based on logical principles. Quijada's goal was to develop a language that encodes a maximum of linguistic information as compactly as possible and thus demonstrates what is at least theoretically possible with human language.

The preliminary result is a language that is extremely complicated in its grammatical structure, so that the effort to learn it would be enormous compared to other ( natural as well as constructed) languages. But this was never intended by Quijada. In this language he packs all possible concepts that are known from grammars of other languages, as well as concepts he has invented, all of which he explains in detail and comprehensibly.

Phonology

Ithkuil has an extremely diverse phonological system - in order to allow the shortest possible words . The phoneme inventory consists of 65 consonants (including aspirated consonants, ejectives and the crackling sound ) and 17 vowels . Some consonants can be pronounced syllabic . Vowels are always pronounced 'pure' and can be diphthongized . A number of allophones are also described. Phonological processes that occur in Ithkuil are: Gemination , word accent changes and five tone forms . Quijada has also worked out very detailed phonotactic and euphonic rules for the language .

morphology

In the morphology of Ithkuil there are only two types of words: Formative and adjuncts . Formatives correspond roughly to nouns and verbs . These are formed from a word stem that is composed of a root , which in turn consists of two consonantic components (" radicals "). There are 60 different shapes for each component, which results in a theoretical maximum number of 3600 roots. The stem is now formed by adding a vowel infix . Which of the 36 possible infixes is chosen depends on which morphological concepts are to be assigned to the trunk. In addition, there are a number of so-called "mutation rules" for all sounds, which produce a multitude of phonological variations from a morphologically determined form.

Adjuncts take over the function of pronouns , articles , prepositions or conjunctions , but also of auxiliary or modal verbs . The adjunct morphology differs from type to type and is nearly as extensive as the morphology of the formatives.

Other notable features of the morphology are, for example, that the valence of a verb is displayed directly, and 14 forms are distinguished. In addition, Ithkuil knows 81 cases , and thereby manages the finest distinctions between meanings.

syntax

The syntax is surprisingly concise compared to the other areas of the language. This is explained by the fact that due to the large variety of morphological concepts, all semantic and pragmatic information can be specified. Thus, the sentence order in Ithkuil can be chosen freely. However, there are two basic positions that are generally applicable. One applies to main clauses , the other to subordinate clauses . Roughly speaking, SOV ( subject - object - verb ) applies to the former and VOS to the latter . The only constraints on the sentence order are those cases in which a direct attributive relationship between two or more constituents is to be expressed.

font

Ithkuil is written in Içtaîl. This sample text is intended to illustrate the writing direction.

The script in which Ithkuil is to be written is called Içtaîl [ ˈɪçtail ]. This is a “morpho-phonemic script”, which means that the characters used partly contain direct information about the phonetic value, as well as information about the morphological use. Those parts of a word whose pronunciation is predictable are not written, while those parts which indicate the phonetic value of the unpredictable part also carry grammatical information necessary to reconstruct the unwritten parts. This also results in an extremely dense amount of information in writing. Assuming all possible combinations of partial symbols, the result is a total of 3606 characters.

The characters are arranged linearly, but the writing is not done in a uniform direction, but "vertically furrowed" (see Bustrophedon ). The characters are not mirrored, but rotated 180 degrees, as illustrated in the example on the right.

Example sentence

Example sentence

To the right is an example sentence written in Içtaîl.

official Ithkuil transcription: Pull ̀ uíqišx ma'wałg eřyaufënienˉ päţwïç auxë'yaļt xne'wïļta'şui tua kit öllá yaqazmuiv li'yïrzişka 'p'amḿ aìlo'wëča šu'yehtlo'

Transcription in IPA : [ pʊlː' ʊɪ'qɪʃx maʔwaʟɡ ɛʁjɑʊfɤnɪɛnˉ pæθwɯç aʊxɤʔjaɬt xnɛʔwiɬtaʔʂʊɪ tʊa kɪt œlːa' jaqazmʊɪv lɪʔjɯɾzɪʂkaʔ p'amː' aɪlɔwɤtʃːa ʃʊʔjɛhtaʂ ]

Audio file / audio sample Listen ? / i

German translation: As our vehicle leaves the ground and crashes over the edge of the cliff towards the valley floor, I ponder whether it is possible that someone could accuse me of a morally reprehensible act after I failed to take a reasonable course along the Maintain roadway.

Dictionary

Since a large number of different words can be derived from a lexeme through the elaborate morphology , the lexicon is correspondingly small in size. In principle, Ithkuil's morphonology would allow over 100,000 lexemes through the 3600 possible roots with their stems, but effectively it takes much less to express all possible concepts. Currently (April 4, 2008) 643 roots are described, from which 11574 stems were formed.

In order to take into account the strict order in the language, Quijada has divided the lexicon into 17 semantic classes, which can be recognized by the alphabetical order of the radicals. These classes are in a nutshell: numerical concepts, comparisons, mathematics - intellectual / cognitive concepts - concepts of change, cause and effect - states of organic matter - concepts of communication, learning and language - physical states of matter in general - spatial concepts, form and movement - taxonomy of organic life - taxonomy of physical substances - concepts of relation, identity and relationship - spatial order / arrangement, configuration - socially or externally induced art perception - personal feelings / preferences / affects / emotions - expressions of social will or personal relationships - concepts of existence / status / appearance / subjectivity - expressions of personal will - temporal concepts

New version

In 2007 Quijada presented a new version of Ithkuil, which he calls Iláksh . He was encouraged to do so after a group of Russian speakers announced that they wanted to learn Ithkuil. The enthusiasm for this was triggered by an article [1] in the Russian computer magazine “Kompjuterra” , in which, among other things, the possibility was discussed that one could think faster because of the extreme conciseness of this language if one could only manage to learn this language . Since Quijada, when designing Ithkuil, had no intention of actually using this language for communication, but at the same time wanted to support this interest, he decided to construct Iláksh, which in principle works like Ithkuil, but only a phoneme inventory of Has 38 consonants and 10 vowels (instead of 65 consonants and 17 vowels). This should at least make it easier to pronounce the words.

Web links