thank you to Anni NG for requesting this episode.
welcome to Conlang Critic,
the show that gets facts wrong about YOUR
favorite conlang! I'm jan Misali, and in this episode,
we'll be looking at the hypothetical representation
of a language, Ithkuil.
immediately after an episode about a language that was
needlessly complicated, we now arrive at a language
that's all about needless complexity.
Ithkuil is an artlang created by John Quijada
in 2004, and then rebooted
in 2007, and then rebooted again
in 2011. we'll be focusing entirely on the
2011 version in this episode. Ithkuil's
consonants are:
I apologize for mispronouncing
like all of those. nonetheless,
look at all those consonants! and this isn't even including
gemination, except where the geminated consonant
makes a completely different sound. oh, gemination is
when you say a consonant for a longer amount of time,
by the way. this isn't in modern English, but it is
in Arabic, Finnish, Japanese, Italian, and
several other languages. Ithkuil's vowels are:
it also happens to be a tonal language. its tonemes are:
the tones apply to an entire word, rather than just one
vowel. it's also a stressed language, and stressed
vowels are written with an acute, and unstressed
vowels are written with a grave, unless it's clear what
the stress should be from context. this phonology
is the biggest we've seen so far, and I doubt
we'll ever see one bigger. this would be the worst
possible phonology if Ithkuil were an
international language, but fortunately, it is not.
Ithkuil isn't about communicating easily.
it's about communicating densely, packing as
much information as possible into as little space
as possible, and if that's the goal, then
using every single sound you know how to make makes
perfect sense, and that's exactly what Quijada did.
now, as for the way these sounds are written, there's
a little left to be desired. once again,
my problem here is with the digraphs. now,
don't get me wrong. there isn't anything inherently wrong
about using digraphs in your conlang's orthography,
but using them here seems to go against
Ithkuil's general philosophy.
I mean, Ithkuil is all about condensing information,
right? so, why would you have some
sounds represented with more than one symbol?
all that does is make words take up more
space, which is the opposite of what Ithkuil wants to do.
of course, there are the concerns of practicality,
but my keyboard doesn't have any easy way to write
a whole lot of the symbols Ithkuil uses already, so
adding another dozen or so wouldn't be THAT
much worse. Ithkuil also has its own writing system
that I can't even begin to understand. it's
kinda like an abugida, but also kinda like
a logography? it looks kinda cool,
but you can't type with it so WHO CARES
Ithkuil's grammar and vocabulary are deeply linked
to one another. Ithkuil's word derivation
process alone is a masterpiece of design.
words are only required to be marked for case,
but you have the option of marking for much, much more.
for example, and this is directly from the
reference grammar, the word "/qʰûl-lyai’svukšei’arpîptó’ks"
is an adverb
meaning, and I quote, ahem,
"being hard to believe, after allegedly trying
to go back to repeatedly inspiring fear
using ragtag groups of suspicious looking clowns,
despite resistance". also, shoutout to
John Quijada for actually demonstrating how to pronounce that,
because there's no way I would've said it
correctly. okay, I'm gonna spend pretty much the rest of this
video explaining exactly how this one word works,
and hopefully, you'll get an idea of what Ithkuil is like.
the slash at the beginning means that the word has
rising tone, and also means that the action
is unsuccessful. the aspirated uvular stop
means two things. first, that the information
contained here is subjective, and second,
that the action happens repeatedly. the vowel "û"
means the action happens despite some resistance.
"l-ly" means the action has happened
before. "ai'" means the
action is a physical event, and it also means something
else we'll get to in a bit. "svu" is one of
the two root words. the "sv" part
means "fear", but the letter "u" after it makes its
meaning more specific. see, every root in
Ithkuil an have up to eighteen associated
meanings, organized by formality, pattern,
and stem. the letter "u" here means that the
root that comes before it has its informal,
pattern three, stem one meaning, which here is
"the experience of being afraid of something".
"kš" is the other root, meaning "fool".
unlike the root "fear", though, the formality, pattern,
and stem aren't indicated by the following vowel,
since "kš" is the main root of the word.
that brings us to the other meaning of "ai'"
from earlier. in addition to indicating a
physical event, it also means that the main root
has its pattern one, stem two meaning, and
the fact that the stress is on the last syllable means that
the main root is formal, and the formal,
pattern one, stem two meaning of
"kš" is "clown". "ei'a"
is the postcursive
case marker, meaning that the time we're talking
about is after the action stopped.
"rp" means five things simultaneously.
it means that we're talking about an actual event,
rather than a hypothetical situation, that we're
talking about a singular event in its entirety,
that we're talking about something that no longer happens,
that the main root comes in groups,
and that said groups aren't very organized.
"î" means that the next set of consonants
are a type one suffix taken to the fourth
degree, which is "pt", meaning "veracity".
what does that mean? well, suffixes are
applied to the main roots of words, and they
come in nine degrees, indicating how much they
apply, so "fourth degree veracity" means
that on a scale of one to nine, where
one is "completely true" and nine is
"completely fake", these clowns have four veracity.
the stressed o means that the minor root,
"fear", is caused by the main root, "clown",
and that this is simply stating
what happened. also, the fact that it's stressed means that the main root
is formal, which was already said. finally,
"'ks" means that you find the whole situation
hard to believe. whew! did you
get all that? I actually simplified a lot.
obviously, most words in Ithkuil don't have that
much information in them, but this is a perfect example of
how much information Ithkuil words can contain.
that's how Ithkuil succeeds where,
say, Ygyde fails. Ygyde's words were
pretty precise, but they were required
to be on that one constant precision level.
withkuil, you can either be as precise
or as imprecise as the situation demands.
most importantly, however, Ithkuil has
better control of its a e s t h e t i c than nearly every
conlang I've ever seen. it knows exactly what it's
doing, and it is exactly what it wants to be.
all in all, I'd say I like Ithkuil more than I like
Láadan, making it the best artlang reviewed so far.
thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time,
where I'll be reviewing Wolflandic.