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* *Uiphawâtļûxe’ň?* *MIGHT IT HAPPEN TO BE A LARGE SYMBOLIC GROVE OF TREES?
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hat may be the most perfect language in the world has no native speakers. In fact it has no speakers at all. What it does have is a website and over 400 pages of grammar collected into a book or, as is more often the case, a series of binders. The language is Ithkuil, a constructed language that took 25 years to create. Constructed languages – ‘conlangs’ - are languages that, unlike the ones we speak every day, have been made to meet a particular need. One of the most famous conlangs is Elvish, the language that J.R.R. Tolkein wrote an entire set of books to explain. Elvish is an artistic language, built to answer a question about a story. The need that Ithkuil meets is a problem of philosophy and logic. What if we spoke a language that took all the best features of existing languages and streamlined them? A language made sense, every feature following a cohesive and incredibly extensive set of rules? What if those rules; pages and pages of them, allowed us to be more exact than we could be in any other language? Ithkuil, to give the exceedingly simple explanation, is constructed from a series of roots. Mathematically, based on the alphabet and grammar of Ithkuil there are around 3,600 possible roots. Only a fraction of those have been attached to actual meanings.
From the root, a stem is formed, and then a variety of letters are slotted in, each adding a layer of meaning. At its most extreme this results in words like the 24 letter, heavily apostrophized term for “being hard to believe, after allegedly trying to go back to repeatedly inspiring fear using rag-tag groups of suspicious-looking clowns, despite resistance” (qhûl-lyai’svukšei’arpîptó’ks). This structure is a large part of why Ithkuil may be the most perfect language. It allows for an incredible degree of expression in very few syllables, complicated though those syllables are. One doesn’t simply state a fact, one states how one knows that fact, numerous specifics about the nature of the fact, and how the fact is meant to be received by the listener. It has been posited that to be able to comprehend and relate all of this in a conversation, someone who speaks Ithkuil as their native language would have to think several times faster than people currently do. The stunning amount of information that Ithkuil can transmit is also its greatest weakness; to date, nobody is fluent in Ithkuil. People have expressed interest in trying to become fluent, but it remains to be proven whether our brains can actually hold all the rules of the language, let alone be able to think fast enough to speak it. So can Ithkuil really be the most perfect language that we have? Can it even be one of the better ones available to us, given that it’s a language that will never be voiced? We rely on language to convey meaning and to specify meaning. We need to tell the person at the market that we would like some apples, but we would also like to be able to tell them that we want some apples that are ripe. On the graph of utility versus specificity, Ithkuil has proudly planted its flag at an extreme. And that calls into question whether it can be classified as a language at all. If languages are means of communication, and no one can actually actively communicate in Ithkuil, Ithkuil becomes something else entirely: an extended essay on how we describe our world. ABIGAIL BURMAN
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