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Oh hey there.
How’s it going?
Did you have a good week?
Yeah I bet you did, because I bet you weren’t stupid enough to try to write a video explaining
the most complicated language in the world.
It’s called Ithkuil, and it’s a conlang—a non-natural, engineered language—developed
by genius-slash-madman-who-stole-a-week-of-my-life John Quijada, and if you want to learn it
and have your mind collapse into itself like mine, you can read this comically long online
guide.
How long is it?
Well, I don’t know.
I tried to find out by pasting it into a word document, but that crashed my computer.
Anyways, ironically, Ithkuil is intended to be maximally precise, while using the fewest
letters possible.
And, to be fair, it succeeds—for example, these two Ithkuil words translate to “On
the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some
point.”
Ithkuil makes few word do trick by making each word extraordinarily information-dense.
Think of Ithkuil not as having a bunch of words to choose from, but instead as a sort
of Chipotle burrito line where, when you need a word, you go to a bunch of stations and
slowly add sounds—called phonemes—that each have specific meanings, to build a word
that means exactly what you need it to.
By the way, Ithkuil includes weird phonemes like xh and q, which I definitely just said
wrong.
This chart is the key to understanding Ithkuil—it lays out the fifteen stations you stop at
to add phonemes and build your word, although we’re only going to focus on the six that
are required.
You start with the root, which gives your word’s base meaning.
There are about 3600 roots, which group together related words.
For example, all words that describe any type of want—desire, crave, need—come from
the root b.
For explaining purposes, let’s say we want a word that will describe how I felt writing
this video: we’d start with KŠ, meaning fool or clown—the S-with-a-hat isn’t actually
pronounced that way, but the guide says it’s, “a voiceless non-labialized lamino-postalveolar
dorso-palatal grooved sibilant fricative,” which doesn’t really help me a whole lot.
Now, each root has 18 stems that are more nuanced versions of the word, split into formal
and informal, then three patterns, with three meanings each.
So for fool/clown, let’s look at our options, and hmm, let’s go with nerd/dweeb, and why
not put it in the context of pathetic.
That’s informal, and the third meaning of the third pattern, but then we also have to
add one of four functions.
All Ithkuil nouns are stative, but just if you’re curious, if it were a verb, function
would help us understand the relationship the verb has to its noun participants, which
is best understood through these examples that we don’t have time to explain.
So, third pattern, third stem, stative, okay, that means we need o- before it.
So far, our word is OKŠ.
Now we move to case: the part the noun is playing in our sentence.
English has three cases: subjective, possessive, objective.
Ithkuil has, you guessed it, 96, which serve to add nuance.
Let’s say that our intended sentence is “the dweeb got a headache from trying to
figure out all this nonsense.”
In that case, I would use the inducive case, which can indicate not only that the dweeb
is the subject, but also that the dweeb is both the agent causing the action, and the
patient being impacted.
Inducive is marked by -u-, so now our word is OKŠU.
Now we get to probably the most complicated part: one single phenome will describe five
different things: essence, extension, configuration, affiliation, and perspective—the last three
of which have no equivalent in any other language.
Let’s start with configuration: there are nine options, which express how many things
our word describes.
Now, I’ve been talking about one dweeb, which would be the uniplex, but actually this
video was made by a whole team of dweebs—so let’s actually use the aggregative configuration,
which describes an associated group or set of non-identical entities.
Next, affiliation: what’s the relationship of us dweebs?
There are four options, but let’s go with the coalescent: that means we’re associated
with each other, but all have different roles, but towards a common goal.
Now let’s talk perspective: basically, it’s like number—plural or singular—plus tense,
except obnoxious.
There are four options, but we’re going with the mondaic, which means that it can
be understood as existing as an accessible bounded entity—unlike, say, the abstract,
which would be like the idea of dweebs, generally.
Then, there are two options for essence: is it an actual thing, or a hypothetical representation
of a thing?
In this case, us dweebs are real.
And finally, there are six extensions.
Extension requires these fully insane drawings to fully explain, but basically it tells you
what part of the thing we’re talking about: the beginning, a section, the whole, so on.
We’re taking about the whole group of dweebs, so that’s the “delimitate.”
And now, we use this inhumanly long set of charts to figure out what letter to add.
Essence: Normal.
Extension: Delimitate.
Perspective: Mondaic.
Affiliation: Coalescent.
Configuration: Aggregative.
That means we add rn.
Which means our word is OKŠURN!
Now we just gotta figure out two more details.
First, tone.
There are seven different tones, which for verbs lets us know version: if an action is
goal or result-oriented, and whether it was successful—for example, a successful attempt
would go rising-falling, unsuccessful would go low tone.
But our word is a noun, which defaults to a falling tone.
Finally, which syllable should be stressed?
That will indicate whether that earlier sound, the o that said third stem, third pattern—pathetic
dweeb, not laughingstock—was operating in the formal or informal side of the chart.
This will also indicate if an event is being used to frame another event—like, in the
sentence “I wrote the video while everyone else had fun,” the clause “everyone else
having fun” would be framing my writing.
But we aren’t doing that, so it’s unframed and informal, which means I must stress the
final syllable.
And now, we can finally say our word: OKŠURN, “the entirety of a non-hypothetical, physically
accessible group of various pathetic dweebs working towards some common goal, who cause
themselves to experience something.”
You know what else is group of various dweebs working towards a common goal: me and my friends
who started Nebula, the streaming site with content from your favorite educational-ish
creators, including a bunch of stuff that the Wendover OKŠURN made: the HAI bricks
special, a three-part trivia show, three Wendover Original documentaries, my podcast Showmakers
with Brian from Real Engineering, and ad-free and often extended versions of all my regular
YouTube videos.
Plus, with the bundle, you’ll also get access to CuriosityStream’s thousands of top-quality
documentaries, including a bunch of great ones on linguistics, like The Grammar of Happiness.
You can get access to both for the rather insane sale price of just over a dollar a
month by going to curiositystream.com/HAI—and when you do, you’ll be helping support independent
creators like us.