Monthly Archive: January 2016

Making fun with Ithkuil easier

During the last few days I've been improving a tool I created a long time ago, which was supposed to make it easier to have fun with Ithkuil. But let's start at the beginning

Ithkuil

Ithkuil is a constructed language created by John Quijada. Constructed languages (or "conlangs") are usually associated with children (I myself was creating my own languages when I was 10-12), but in this case you couldn't be further from the truth. Even though Ithkuil doesn't really have practical applications, I think it is unusually interesting.

Ithkuil emphasizes conveying as much information as possible, as concisely as possible. As a result, it has 45 consonants and 13 vowels, and almost every sound in a word carries a separate bit of information. How was this achieved?

In Ithkuil there are two main classes of words - formatives and adjuncts. Formatives function as nouns or verbs, adjuncts convey additional information about formatives and sometimes mimic the personal pronouns. Let's focus on formatives: each one consists of a root, which carries main information about the meaning of the word (like, for example, "oral sound"), which then can be inflected by over 20 different grammatical categories using numerous affixes. For example, the root for "oral sound" (-l-) can be inflected by adding "e-" in front -> "el-", making it "spoken utterance". To get the smallest possible word, we need another vowel and a consonant -> "elal". "a" marks the Oblique case, which is pretty neutral. "-l" on the other hand means that we are speaking of a single object, functioning as a separate whole, we mean it in its entirety and as a concrete object and not its mental representation. This way, "elal" can be translated just as "spoken utterance".

(more…)