Ithkuil

Ithkuil is an experimental constructed language created by John Quijada. It is designed to express more profound levels of human cognition briefly yet overtly and clearly, particularly about human categorization. It is a cross between an a priori philosophical and a logical language. It tries to minimize the vagueness and semantic ambiguity found in natural human languages. Ithkuil is notable for its grammatical complexity and extensive phoneme inventory, the latter being simplified in the latest redesign. The name "Ithkuil" is an anglicized form of Iţkuîl, which in the original form roughly meant "hypothetical representation of a language." Quijada states he did not create Ithkuil to be auxiliary or used in everyday conversations. Instead, he wanted the language for more elaborate and profound fields where more insightful thoughts are expected, such as philosophy, arts, science, and politics. Meaningful phrases or sentences can usually be expressed in Ithkuil with fewer linguistic units than natural languages. For example, the two-word Ithkuil sentence "Tram-mļöi hhâsmařpţuktôx" can be translated into English as "On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point." Quijada deems his creation as too complex to have developed naturally, seeing it as an exercise in exploring how languages could function.…

Ithkuil is an experimental constructed language created by John Quijada. It is designed to express more profound levels of human cognition briefly yet overtly and clearly, particularly about human categorization. It is a cross between an a priori philosophical and a logical language. It tries to minimize the vagueness and semantic ambiguity found in natural human languages. Ithkuil is notable for its grammatical complexity and extensive phoneme inventory, the latter being simplified in the latest redesign. The name "Ithkuil" is an anglicized form of Iţkuîl, which in the original form roughly meant "hypothetical representation of a language." Quijada states he did not create Ithkuil to be auxiliary or used in everyday conversations. Instead, he wanted the language for more elaborate and profound fields where more insightful thoughts are expected, such as philosophy, arts, science, and politics. Meaningful phrases or sentences can usually be expressed in Ithkuil with fewer linguistic units than natural languages. For example, the two-word Ithkuil sentence "Tram-mļöi hhâsmařpţuktôx" can be translated into English as "On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point." Quijada deems his creation as too complex to have developed naturally, seeing it as an exercise in exploring how languages could function. It was featured in the Language Creation Conference's 6th Conlang Relay. Four versions of the language have been published: the initial version in 2004¹, a simplified version called Ilaksh in 2007, a third version in 2011, and the current version ( ), called New Ithkuil. In 2004 —and again in 2009 with Ilaksh—Ithkuil was featured in the Russian-language popular science and IT magazine Computerra. In 2008, David J. Peterson awarded it the Smiley Award. In 2013, Bartłomiej Kamiński codified the language to parse complicated sentences quickly. Julien Tavernier and anonymous others have since followed suit. Since July 2015, Quijada has released several Ithkuil songs in a prog-rock style as part of the album Kaduatán, which translates to "Wayfarers." Recently, online communities have developed in English, Russian, Mandarin, and Japanese.

Etymology

Versions of Ithkuil are generally numbered with Roman numerals, e.g. Ithkuil I, Ithkuil II. Despite this, Ithkuil has other names attached to it, either officially named or was named by the Ithkuil-enthusiast community: Ithkuil I version was named as "Iţkuîl" (anglicised: Ithkuil; ) which became the origin of the name "Ithkuil", Ithkuil II as "ilákš" (anglicised: ilaksh; ), Ithkuil III as "Elartkha" or "elartkʰa" ( ), and Ithkuil IV which is commonly referred to as TNIL or "The New Ithkuilic Language" or also known as "Malëuţřait" by the community.

Ithkuil

The word iţkuîl was a formative derived from the root k-l (broadly concerning "speech", "voice", or even "interpretation") through the addition of several morphological determinants: The -u- vocalic infix kul was 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 gave no emphasis on the meaning or the vocal rendering of the word. The u → uî mutation of the infix Secondary mode, as opposed to primary mode, meant that the word kuîl is not to refer to a real-life phenomenon, but rather to a mental representation, or projection, of that phenomenon; to an imaginary or hypothetical object. Thus translating as, "a made-up word". A grade 8 mutation of the first radical consonant: k → ţk The configuration of the term was composite. Roughly corresponding to the plurality concept in Indo-European languages, it also implies the objects in question (words, kuîl) to be diverse, while forming a "coherent emergent entity" (rather than just a collection or an array of different words), thus meaning "a vocabulary" or "lexicon". The i- vocalic prefix, one of the 24 possible for formative roots The extension was delimitive, perceiving "vocabulary" as entire, with clearly distinguished boundaries, as opposed to it being just a local manifestation such as slang or a dialect of a broader lexicon (-ţkuîl). The affiliation of the set of objects in question was coalescent. This indicates that the individual members of the set act together toward a higher purpose by coordinating their complementary functions. Thus, "a vocabulary/lexicon" becomes "a language". Syllabic stress on the penultimate syllable (-u-) The perspective of the noun is monadic, seeing "the language" as a single and specific entity, rather than a collection of many languages existing separately, the general phenomenon ("human languages") or the abstract idea of language. Thus, the approximate translation of iţkuîl was "an idea/fantasy of a complete purposeful system of complementary speech elements", or simply "an imaginary language".

History

John Quijada's youth

John Quijada was born around 1959¹ in Los Angeles, United States to a Mexican-American immigrant couple. He is a native English speaker and can speak French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. He also claims to be able to read in Catalan and Interlingua; however, he cannot converse in these languages. Quijada's interest in conlanging began when he was introduced to the utopian politics of the Esperanto group as well as some books from a record store near his home. In addition, during the 1970s, he discovered an album by the French band Magma, a progressive rock-genre group band which made songs in Kobaïan, a constructed language they created. He created his first constructed language at the age of 15 he called Mbozo. It was a combination of Romance-Germanic languages with vocabulary and phonology derived from African languages. Later on, he also created the Pskeoj, a language which was generated from "random typing on a typewriter". John Quijada pursued a linguistics degree at the California State University, Fullerton with the ambition to become an anthropologist in the field of linguistics. However, he was unable to complete his undergraduate studies due to financial problems. He then worked at the Department of Motor Vehicles with the hope of continuing his studies when he had enough money. In the meantime, he continued his studies in linguistics by himself. He "spent hours in the library" reading books on the elements of a language that is fairly exotic compared to many other languages in the world. In addition, Quijada also made annual visits to Cody's Books, a legendary bookstore in Berkeley, California to find new reads. From his reading, Quijada found "unique and exotic" features some languages have and had the desire to unify all of those into one language.

Past versions

Ithkuil (2004)

The original version of Ithkuil had a significantly more complicated morphophonology.

Formatives

Roots are Ithkuil's most basic semantic units. All Ithkuil formatives are derived from a limited number of roots. Each root consists of a cluster of 1–4 consonants (five-consonant clusters are also available, but remain without an assigned meaning). The current lexicon of Ithkuil can potentially consist of approximately 3600 word roots, just over 1000 of which have been assigned definitions. From the root, word stems are formed by affixing the vocalic affix that indicates stem pattern, stem type, function for the stem, and by stressing a particular syllable to indicate informal or formal designation. There are three stems associated with each root. Each stem comes in three patterns, one holistic and two complementary ones. Holistic stem 1 typically refers to the most general manifestation of a root, whereas holistic stems 2 and 3 typically refer to more specific manifestations associated with the root. Each holistic stem has two complementary stems associated with it, which refer to the complementary concepts related to the holistic stem. The specific meaning of complementary stems depends somewhat on the root. These are derived from the word roots by prefixing a vowel or diphthong that also indicates the grammatical category function. Two examples are given in the tables below:

Basic morphology

All Ithkuil formatives, whether functioning as nouns or verbs, inflect for various grammatical categories that are quite dissimilar from any of those in natural languages. Quantization is more or less covered by the grammatical categories of Configuration, Affiliation, and Perspective, even though these do not technically refer to number per se.

Cases

There are 96 grammatical cases in Ithkuil, one special case being the vocative, used for direct address. Verbal formatives inflect for case under Frame constructions (i.e., dependent clauses). The grammatical cases of Ithkuil can be divided into several distinct groups:

Verbal morphology

Several distinct grammatical categories apply only to verbal formatives. These are listed below:

Suffixes

Ithkuil uses a variety of affixes, termed suffixes, to further delineate what is described by the formative. They come in three types and often correlate with adverbs.

Adjuncts

There are two types of adjuncts in Ithkuil: personal-reference adjuncts and verbal adjuncts. All adjuncts are highly synthetic. Personal reference adjuncts are akin to pronouns in English. There are two types of personal-reference adjuncts in Ithkuil: Single-referent and dual-referent. Verbal adjuncts are adjuncts that work in conjunction with verbal formatives to provide information about the latter's Valence, Level, Phase, Sanction, Illocution, Modality, Aspect, and Bias. Of these, Modality and Level can only be indicated using verbal adjuncts, whereas the others can also be expressed on the verbal formative.

Cartouche-like face

Ilaksh word roots are symbolized by cartouche shapes which will be the foundation of the glyph-like symbol placed above them. In addition, the type of the root can also be determined from the color and shape of the side of the cartouche itself. The formative of the root is determined by the direction of the cartouche itself (e.g., when a root is written using a horizontal direction, it has a nominal formative). There are 30 sisian shapes used in the cartouche-cartouche with the shoot direction facing left (upper table) and right (lower table). The left-facing shoot is considered the "default" shape for each side. The cartouche in the Ilaksh writing system consists of four different colors (black, white, gray, shaded or striped) and each of them contains 30 side shapes. There are total of 120 glyph combination available, denoting C R consonantal structure. The 30 form of edge derived from the combination of 5 V R vowel phoneme and 6 tone. To distinguish between the phonological elements represented by the sisian shapes, consonantal elements have left-facing (or top) tops, while vowel and tone elements have right-facing (or bottom) tops.

Case function

The basic shape (hexagon) of the glyph undergoes a shape change when it represents a grammatical case of Ilaksh. The forms are divided into 96 modified forms that represent 96 grammatical cases in the morphological structure of Ilaksh, so that one form represents only one grammatical case. Case modification only occurs on the left half of the first glyph in a cartouche face. The following are the 96 left hemisphere modified forms of the first glyph in the cartouche. The number written above each glyph is the description of the case element it represents. |valign="top"| |valign="top"| |valign="top"| |}

References

External links

Community on Reddit devoted to the Ithkuil language Information site (Russian) New Ithkuil Chinese Translation by Yuorb

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1377285625 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.