In 2004, a man called John Quijada uploaded a webpage of 160 000 words
detailing the grammar and vocabulary of his constructed language, Ithkuil.
He later created a phonologically simplified version of the language
in 2007, and a third version in 2011, which is the current form of Ithkuil,
though he announced in 2017 that he was working on a mark four.
"Natural languages are adequate," Quijada told a journalist,
"but that doesn't mean they're optimal."
Ithkuil wasn't created for use in everyday communication, and to date,
no-one claims to speak it fluently, including Quijada himself.
It is an exercise in the extents and limitations of human language.
Ithkuil combines three seemingly contradictory goals... to express
deeper aspects of human cognition than what is found in natural languages,
to reduce semantic ambiguity as much as possible for an incredibly precise language,
and thirdly to do all this while keeping the language morphophonologically concise...
In other words, the language aims to say a lot in very few syllables.
And how does Ithkuil achieve this?
Let's take a look at the example that Quijada himself
gives on the introduction page of ithkuil.net.
This phrase, which consists of two words and which I'm not going to
be trying to pronounce, roughly translates to...
"On the contrary, I think it may turn out that
this rugged mountain range trails off at some point."
Taking just the first word here, we can break this down into three components.
This bit means "on the contrary", this bit here basically means "it may turn out to be that",
and this bit means "at some point".
You could break down the second word in much the same way, and you have all these little
morphological units that carry one or two bits of meaning each, to form the sentence as a whole.
This language consists of root words and affixes used to specify information,
leading to a very concise, very precise language.
So what do I mean when I say "the Ithkuil fallacy"?
This video is not a critique of Ithkuil. For the record, I think it's one of the
best constructed languages of all time, and as a piece of art it's fantastic.
But what I call the "Ithkuil fallacy" does not refer to the quality of this
particular language, but to a way of thinking about language.
Because some people think of any language, languages in general, as being basically
less efficient versions of Ithkuil.
For example, the idea is that if you take this phrase in English, you can, just like in Ithkuil,
divide up the sentence to show where each bit of meaning is stored.
Sometimes, we have several pieces of meaning stored within a single morpheme,
like in the Spanish "habla", where this morpheme is a stem from the infinitive "hablar",
meaning "to speak", and this "-a" morpheme conveys that this is singular,
third person, indicative and present all at once.
"He speaks" or "she speaks", all in all.
But at the end of the day, different morphemes and parts of speech are used to convey
one or more bits of meaning to the listener.
Where no meaning is being added, like with grammatical gender, or information is repeated,
like where a plural form is denoted with both an article and an inflection of the noun...
This is seen as a mistake, a human error, something that
went wrong in the development of the language.
I don't want to say that this view is stupid,
because I think it's something we naturally tend towards when learning a new language.
I mean, why add plural adjective endings when you already know the noun is plural, Spanish?
And German, why are you conjugating your verbs by person when pronouns are already compulsory?
I mean, all right, I get that we have "sie" and "sie" meaning "she"
and "they", and they're only differentiated by verb conjugation.
So "sie hat" means "she has" and "sie haben" means "they have",
so we can keep that verb conjugation for "they" (the plural "sie"), but all those others can go.
Why bother with them? We still know what's being said, just by the pronoun.
And, well, I think this is an example of the Ithkuil fallacy.
I'm not saying that those verb conjugations by person are necessary - plenty of languages
work just fine without them - nor am I saying that they add any meaning.
But things don't have to add meaning to be useful to some degree.
Let me show you what I mean with little experiment I conducted with the excellent
people over on the Klein's Kommunity Discord server (invite link in the description).
Verbs in the German present tense are more conjugated than those in English.
Take the verbs "will" and "can", which are invariable in the present,
and what we could broadly consider to be their German counterparts, "können" and "werden".
Sure, these German words have a lot of unnecessary information at the end of the verb stem... but
which of these languages do you think it would be easier to hear in a high-noise environment?
I tried to simulate such an environment by highly corrupting audio files of a
text-to-speech voice reading out English pronoun-verb pairings in one condition,
and German pronoun-verb pairings in the other.
Participants were given three audio files, and asked to play each one only once.
The first consisted of ten phrases with the verb "can" or "können", the second ten phrases with
"will" or "werden", and the third with 15 mixed phrases.
For all files, participants were asked to write down the subject pronoun being used
in each phrase... and sure enough, the German speakers found this a lot
easier than the English ones... and I mean a LOT.
The average score out of 35 for English speakers was just over 8,
whilst it was over 28 for German speakers.
The very highest score recorded for English,
17 out of 35, was still lower than the lowest score for German, 19.
Using a Mann-Whitney u-test, we see that in spite of the small sample size,
this result is significant at the 1% significance level.
We can pretty safely reject the idea that comprehension of German pronouns
in distorted audio is identical to that of English pronouns.
My theory is that this is because of verb conjugations.
In the German audio, listeners had two clues as to what the pronoun was:
first, the pronoun itself, and then the conjugation at the end of the verb.
Meanwhile, the English usually only had the pronoun to go by.
My point here is not that German is grammatically superior to English.
Having fewer conjugations by person works just fine.
What I am saying is that language isn't just about meaning.
Language is about communication... and meaning isn't all there is to communication.
Because sometimes, the room we're in is really loud, or we mishear something.
Maybe these extra plural endings and verb conjugations are a product of human error...
but not in the sense that they're useless and we left them in any way, accidentally.
In the sense that in many languages across the world,
we've got systems to help compensate for our own errors in hearing...
and I think that's pretty cool.