[MichaelDickens]

Ithkuil seems like what a language should be: as the article said, it is both precise and concise. It looks the way Esperanto ought to have looked. I find Quijada's effort deeply impressive.

I don't know much about designing human languages, but I know how hard it is to design a decent programming language (see http://colinm.org/language_checklist.html), and building a serious human language seems orders of magnitude more difficult. I've never seen an attempt that really intrigued me until I found Ithkuil.

[smsm42]

Language should not be concise. Redundancy is built into the language for a reason - language communication is extremely noisy and if there's two-bit-error distance between "I love you" and "I killed and ate your dog" then the usage of this language by humans would not be comfortable.

Moreover, people communicating are imperfect. So if you have a language which is very precise and concise, you would have to spend a lot of effort to find a word or set of words which exactly expresses your meaning (in programming, we call it design when we do it upfront, and debugging when we do it post factum) and communication would be a very complex exercise. However, if you have a lot of words which mean roughly the same, you can be sure the meaning is passed through even if the words are not chosen super-carefully.

[laichzeit0]

In some languages the meaning of a word is highly dependent on the pitch accent, like ancient Greek. If you're 1 bit off you have trouble :) Surprising enough I read an example of this yesterday evening:

"Hegelochus, the actor in Euripides' Orestes, which was presented in 408 BC, in line 279 of the play, instead of "after the storm I see again a calm sea" (galeén' horoo), Hegelochus recited "after the storm I see again a weasel" (galeên horoo)."

[legutierr]

One of the most famous passages from the Bible seems to have have been affected by (or benefited from) a similar ambiguity.

Mark 10:25 (and parallel versions in Matthew and Luke) has prompted much speculation over the centuries with regards to the origin of it's evocative metaphor: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God."

But when you consider that the word for camel (kamêlos) and for rope (kamilos) differ by only one vowel, quite a mundane explanation springs to mind: someone in the early church misheard, misspelled, or mistranslated Jesus' original admonition.

The more satisfying explanation, the one that I prefer, is that this is a pun that happens to have gotten lost in translation.

The few comments in this blog article offer some interesting explanations:

http://rambambashi.wordpress.com/2010/06/03/common-errors-36...

[estebank]

Case in point, the Turkish I problem has had tragic consequences: http://gizmodo.com/382026/a-cellphones-missing-dot-kills-two...

[smsm42]

Having to deal in the past with the code broken due to Turkish having two i's and weird case conversion rules (for both i and I, case change goes to the other letter which is not present in ASCII) I can only be happy it didn't come to these proportions.

[RVuRnvbM2e]

It's hard to overstate the importance of redundancy in natural languages.

This is the whole reason we are able to make ourselves understood in a noisy, imprecise world. Even if you miss a few syllables - or even half a sentence, you can usually piece together what the other person was trying to say.

Imagine someone technology-illiterate trying to describe a problem they're having with their computer in this language. Impossible.

[microtonal]

It's hard to overstate the importance of redundancy in natural languages.

There are other factors at play, such that speech perception is multi-modal. E.g. see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGurk_effect

[rodgerd]

> Ithkuil seems like what a language should be: as the article said, it is both precise and concise.

Language should be useful and expressive for its users. Human languages designed by the kind of people who prize simplicity and regularity above all other qualities tend to fail for much the same reason programming language designers are hurt and disappointed to discover C is still popular.

[yepguy]

Ithkuil is not simple. It's so ridiculously complex that it is just not possible for anyone to learn to speak fluently. It never stood any chance of being adopted in the way Esperanto has. I'm surprised that it found any use at all, but people without linguistics training seem to find it useful for discovering nuances in their own languages that they hadn't considered.

[dunmalg]

>people without linguistics training seem to find it useful for discovering nuances in their own languages that they hadn't considered.

Learning any foreign language will tend to do that, though. It's a function of being forced to consider your native tongue as a language, rather than just speaking it. Plus if you learn a foreign language, you will have the advantage of being able to talk to an established base of people who speak it.

[yepguy]

Yes but Ithkuil is a bit unique in that it decided to include as many grammatical distinctions as possible.

[abruzzi]

>Ithkuil seems like what a language should be: as the article said, it is both precise and concise.

Which is good for scientists and logicians, but would probably be an issue for novelists and poets. Exploiting ambiguity is a common feature of the arts.

[andreasvc]

Esperanto was designed first and foremost to be learnable, it seems to be quite successful in this regard whereas it's not a strong point of Ikthuil (as it wasn't a priority). With "ought to have looked", do you mean in your own opinion, or are you referring to some of Esperanto's original goals? I always got the impression that learnability and ease of use were bigger priorities.

Personally, I don't have much faith in the idea that you can make people's communication more precise and concise by designing the language in a certain way, just as I don't think that politically correct language leads to meaningful change. This is simply because I don't believe than language can drastically change the way people think (linguistic determinism, strong Whorfianism). Esperanto is very similar to natural languages in its (im)precision, which might just be the level where humans naturally converge to if left to their own devices.

[Steko]

58 different phonemes means the language is just substituting one form of complexity for another.

And apq’uxasiu for 'gawk' doesn't strike me as a particularly huge win for conciseness.

[ZoFreX]

> And apq’uxasiu for 'gawk' doesn't strike me as a particularly huge win for conciseness.

It seems like it's missing the linguistic equivalent of huffman coding: make frequently used things shorter.

Also, it's hardly concise with respect to time if you have to spend 30 minutes consulting a dictionary to utter a single sentence.

[kazagistar]

The huffman coding strategy relies too much on culture to remain properly useful over different groups and time.

[canjobear]

Given that you're communicating to an agent who can use context for disambiguation, all efficient languages will be ambiguous.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027711... (Sorry for the paywall...)

So maybe Ithkuil isn't what a language should be after all. And maybe that's why no natural language looks like it...

[induscreep]

So basically language decoding is multimodal like one of the other comments here said? Like in digital communication, perfect decoding needs appropriate SNR (context) in addition to optimal spectral efficiency (conciseness/preciseness of the language). Interesting research.

[hackerboos]

I remember a criticism of Esperanto was that it was too similar to Europeans languages. I read about a language that was similar to Esperanto but incorporated Chinese and Arabic qualities. Does anybody know this?

[andreasvc]

It's really only the vocabulary which takes from European languages, because the grammar is schematic, very regular and simple to learn. Broadly speaking, you have two options: 1) you select a specific group (e.g., European languages) and sample from their vocabulary. 2) you sample from ALL the world's languages, or generate completely random words (effectively just as hard to learn).

In the first case you have privileged one group, but in the second everyone loses ... In the second case you create an additional barrier because there is a large amount of new vocabulary that everyone has to learn, while in the other anyone who doesn't know European languages will have to learn some of its vocabulary, but that might be useful to them anyway, so it clearly seems like the better option to me.