worst part: the IPA representation is right at the end of the line he read even worse part: it says how you're supposed to pronounce it at the start of said line
@@Pining_for_the_fjords Military dude: "They said something like itxapodúrxameeshnoput." Linguist: "Oh, 'We have come to procure you with the necessary language skills to be practically able to fully master the time dimension with the peaceful intention to enable you to help us in the far future'".
I think this would make a neat "spell incantation" language since part of the very idea of magic words is that they are extremely specific and information dense. Also, the idea of the language being incomprehensible to those without special training is another common trope.
It also addresses the super specific pronunciations which are equally present where just even a wrong inflection can mess up a spell (take Harry Potters infamous "leviosa not leviosaaa")
The problem here is actually writing it. It would be a huge unnecessary time sink in the writing process when writing already often requires a whole lot of research to try and sound intelligent about topics the writer is personally unfamiliar with. There is a reason most writers don't try and pull a Tolkien despite how cool it might seem to make your own language for your world.
From "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" (The wizard's book): "A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer's idea of a spirit. It cannot be seen or touched. It is not composed of matter at all. However, it is very real. It can perform intellectual work. It can answer questions. It can affect the world by disbursing money at a bank or by controlling a robot arm in a factory. The programs we use to conjure processes are like a sorcerer's spells. They are carefully composed in arcane and esoteric _programming languages_ that prescribe the tasks we want our processes to perform". Honestly why your idea isn't a thing in fantasy can be attributed to the fact that writers are _writers,_ not computer scientists or linguists (save for a certain guy who wrote a story about some dwarfs...) A dumb idea occurred to me: A fantasy book in which spells are cast using actual programming languages (or just a language in general) , and the book itself is structured like a language course. We follow a young wizard apprentice learning the language and eventually saving the world... WHY IS THAT NOT A THING??? IT BASICALLY WRITES ITSELF!!!
Yep, this is why. It's because language is used by societies, and the average intelligence and understanding of any group goes down as the size of the group increases. This is also why jargon is a thing - a group of post-doc linguists have no problem deciphering what is a voiceless non-labialised etc. etc. sibilant fricative, but the general population is going to struggle. Any language is only as complex as it can be understood by the dumbest people in a large group.
@@michaeltagor4238 Yup. But the paradox of language is that things get simpler without actually getting simpler. If it simplifies in some aspect, it gets more complicated in another. For instance, English lost its morphological complexity in exchange for syntactical complexity. This paradox is the reason languages change all the time.
Ithkuil looks like the result of an AI developing a language for humans. Complete with lookup tables incorporating all the sounds that a human can make in an efficient grid. Ease of use and was definitely not a concern.
I thought a similiar vein too. Kinda like a language that AI can use to cross interface with English (and all the languages on earth eventually), that will be precise, complex, and directly relatable for computer AI to eventually communicate “effectively” with humans thru reading, writing, speaking, even just thinking or on Musk’s Neurolink etc. It will allow androids, robots, AI, computers, humans, and maybe eventually animals I bet to communicate thoughts and feelings, ideas, statements, questions, answers etc in their language that the AI will decode/incode etc. Fascinating yet also unnerving like Skynet will be on its way, and could communicate thru those huge giant LCD digital tower giant screens that will broadcast any person, idol, celebrity, politician, dead or alive, onto the LCD screen as a digital giant future ruler that will simultaneously communicate with people around the globe 🌎.
Yeah, the AI considers all the sounds a human can make, but not whether we WANT to make those sounds. (Nightmare image of human in blacklight hooked up to a blood-greasy rack with electrodes all over it, and an AI voice saying, "Come on, do the French nasal vowels, it's not so hard!")
@@Matty002 No? Nasal vowels are not that common. In European languages I think only French, Portuguese and Galician have them. Oh, wait, Polish has 2, ą and ę, but they are no longer pronounced all the time where they are spelled. They are a corruption where an "N" used to be pronounced after a vowel. They reek of decay. French has 4 kinds, but in France itself it may be retreating to only 3 types. "Un bon vin blanc!" It is a mystic art, to pronounce the N without actually pronouncing the N!
@@Dracopol i know what nasal vowels are, i speak french. what does them being common have to do with anything? your fake AI said 'hard' not common. lowering your velum while articulating a vowel is not hard. there are even english dialects with nasal vowels. a trilled uvilar R is hard
Even if everyone in the world magically forgot every language, and magically learned this one, this language wouldn't last. Just from usage, it would immediately begin to rapidly simplify and become something very different from its original.
Yep. Languages must reach a balance between speakers and listeners and this language feels speaker heavy! I don't really feel it was ever intended to be a human language, but a language a computer would love!
@@sion8 I think it would be a good language to write policy in. Like laws and other legal documents, so that there's less room for interpretation. Also, a feel as though there's going to be a Bible translation, if there's not already.
@@daniel.santos 🤣 I'm not sure, but maybe. I'm looking at the Wikipedia article of this language and the creator never intended this language to be used as everyday conversation, but for fields like philosophy "to be used for more elaborate and profound fields where more insightful thoughts are expected", that's apparently what he has said about it.
That's true. Languages will ALWAYS prioritize efficiency and simplicity over accuracy. After all, that's where context clues come into play anyway. A language this convoluted would never survive in this form in a natural environment, even with no alternatives.
This language is genius, why bother with text compression when you can just compress your whole language. And People on twitter would love this language, it would give them even more characters to bully people
@@wyntyrr wait so is ðe /aa/ þing supposed to be an indication of a long vowel or is ðere some rule ðat dictates ðat ðe glottal stop is automatically placed between two vowels? Edit: or maybe it's someþing i can't þink of aðm
It's like this was all done up as an elaborate April fool's joke, but they forgot to set up a translation for "hey, I was just joking", and so now we have a weirdly complex language.
@@prisma. yes but what if we captured a child and taught them this language from a young age. Like imagine how would a child that has only known ikthul all their life learn English?
It is impossible to place implied or subtle meanings in this language because it's basically designed to convey messages in the most exact and comprehensive ways possible.
Ah but just because the language is precise, it doesn't mean the writer/speaker has to be. You can still be ironic or change the grammar, using formal/informal or the wrong case on purpose for effect? Also, slang would be interesting...
@@joshuaoehler5796 I would agree, but I think it would probably still be possible to create poetry with hidden or multiple meanings in this language given that metaphors exist and also we will never be able to come up with a language that actually perfectly describes every single thing, so some things will be left unexplained, and you could make poetry with those things. Also, things can be said “incorrectly” for the purpose of art.
Unironically, if you did that it would help you loads actually remembering and internalizing the material. Because the language is so dense and filled with context a lot of thought needs to be put into what the context of the words you write is. Writing in Ithkuil necessitates actually understanding what it is you want to say, so by the time you've finished writing your cheat sheet in Ithkuil you probably don't need the cheat sheet anymore.
@@DaveTheVader which is the main function of the notecard anyway. The promise of "easy/free" information available to you during the test is just a trick to get you to sit down and actually study
HAI: complains that “voiceless non-labialized lamino-postalveolar dorso-palatal grooved sibilant fricative” tells him nothing IPA [ʃ] right there: am I a joke to you?
@@Abigail-hu5wf You're a fool if you thought he's been writing his own videos this whole time - at this point he's a narrator for a research team. They probably do know what they are talking about, he doesn't and that makes him mispronounce but doesn't impeach the credibility of the whole video. They do need better QC tho
As a linguist, all the mixing up of the "morpheme" and "phoneme" concepts in this video slightly triggers me, but I love how this video actually builds a word as an example for us. It is great. (By the way, you guys showed how the word should be stressed in the last syllable, but your final pronuntiation stressed the penultime syllable. It's still great, though, I just noticed it the second time around). Also, lots of the things here are suprasegmental stuff, and I have no idea on how the morpheme concept works with supragmental stuff. I'll assume it is pretty much the same as it is for segments, but if any fellow linguist would explain this to me, I'd be thankful.
I think it’s incorrect to say ‘as a linguist, it triggers me’. Should be ‘As a linguist, I find it annoying’. So that the subject of the 2nd part is the same thing that you refer to in the 1st part. As a linguist, I find THIS frustrating.
@@erynn9968As a linguist, you oughtn't subscribe to such prescriptive grammar rules. Dangling modifiers are dispreferred but they are hardly ever actually ambiguous; in fact, I often analyze them as being akin to a topic, like Japanese "wa" phrases.
@@asheep7797 In pop linguistic spaces such as this, prescriptivism (the idea that there are certain correct ways to do language) is still quite entrenched even though it's long obsolete in professional Linguistics (this is one of the ways where pop science lags behind actual science) This is all contrasted with descriptivism which is the idea that a language is what its speakers are speaking it as, and that a linguists job is to study and describe that, rather than impose arbitrary rules as an authority figure (which'd be prescriptivism). If you were in English speaking public schooling than most likely you've come across a few cases here and there of like 'then vs than' or 'don't use *can* use *may*' or you might have gotten it from your parents as well (prescriptivism in other languages is of course also a thing but there I lack knowledge as to specific examples)
Hey, it's AxxL, an extremely famous bot known for invading in big channels, promoting his own channel while also saying some incomprehensible garbage and thinks he's gonna be a big name without putting in the effort with his videos and such. Don't you've a life that's not self promotion? With that time you waste, you'd've a decent but loyal following.
@@GoinGreninja I believe he is indeed a real person and does seem to be writing quite a lot of these texts by himself (also indicated by that typo in OPs Name he wanted to recite). He has been doing this shtick for years, firstly only under bigger German channels (I think it somehow worked out, a bigger UA-camr reacted to his channel giving a considerable boost...), but he does seem to be going international for quite some while now. It does seem to work though...
@@Mimi.1001 That may be true but whether or not he's a real person, doing this much self promotion is still a very scummy move. And of course, just because he's successful with this 'tactic', that doesn't mean his audience will stay on because of his content and character.
A similar conlang was described in the 1949 story "Gulf" by Robert Heinlein. The major problem with such a language is the lack of redundancy. Any mispronunciation, mishearing, speech impediment, tone-deafness, noisy environment or low-quality communications technology, means serious miscommunication.
@@condorianonegdiffsgoku that's a skill issue on your part though also you can just invent a language with thousands of symbols distinct enough, or composed by multiple simpler symbols. just look at chinese or hindi.
Ithkuil is not designed to mimick Robert Heinlein's Speedtalk, that common misconception Quijada actually responds to in his FAQ. Whereas Heinlein's Speedtalk is focused on compression, Ithkuil instead is intended to convey as much cognitive intent and semantic nuance/exactitude per morpheme.
These super-information-dense languages seem great until you try to actually use them. Packing so much information into so little space with no redundancy means any minor error or damage can create a valid, but incorrect word. So you send a nice formal letter to your boss only to be fired because a smudge turned "working for you" into "screwing your mom". In English this can still happen ("car" and "can" differ by only a fraction of a letter), but usually there's enough redundancy that you can infer what the damaged/wrong worm was suposed to be, even if you omitted a letter entirely like I just did, or used the wrong word. Even if you an entire word it can still be understood.
Yeah, it's impressive that we can make the model maximum precision languages but in practice they'd be terribly inefficient. Our brains have evolved to infer and deduce meaning from an imprecise statement. TL;DR: Subconscious mind waaaaay ahead of you.
Yeah, but pretty sure Ithkuil has quite a bit of redundancy itself. It is information dense, but that doesn't necessarily make it "efficient" in the context of conversation or everyday life. The grammar requires *much* more syntactic information to express semantic ideas than natural languages. What this means is there's a large amount of redundancy baked into the grammar, which probably means it isn't any less understandable or comprehensible in the presence of signal errors than any other language.
Who actually thinks these are good? Good for what? If they were good, human languages would resemble them. Language is literally only useful because we use it
A few corrections: it's "phoneme" not "phenome", a voiceless non-labialised lamino-postalveolar Dorso-palatal grooved sibilant fricative is basically the "sh" sound (IPA: [ʃ]) and the "possessive" case in English is actually called the "genitive".
The worst part is it literally says "As in English shoeshine without rounding the lips" so basically I think with my inferiour linguistics as in "ship" right at the beggining of the actual sentence
Thanks for posting this comment, the pronunciation of phoneme made me question my sanity for a minute...I had that feeling like when you find out you've been singing the wrong song lyric in front of everybody for years lol.
You have got to be about the most superficial commentator on con-languages since the idiotic B. Gilson. Did I miss the one where you said which conlang you’re fluent in and read at least three times a week and can read new books in every week of even one year or listen to radio shows in every week? New radio shows?
@@kalabuk1678 who are you responding to? OP has no content on their channel, (i don't even think that what you're saying is relevant to what they said, they just said that Toki Pona is simple), and no one else said anything related to what you're saying? did the original preson that you're replying to delete their comment? if so, ok, but who are you even talking to?
I want to have a single, A4 paper filled with small Ithkuil text framed on my bedroom wall. -"What is that?" +"Oh, that? Its the whole of Lord of the Rings hexalogy"
This language is the most efficient if you look at how much few words can say, but also the less efficient language if you look at how much work you have to make just one word.
@@darkpixel1128 Exactly, it's a very weird concept for a language and I'd say that the motto "Virtus in medio stat" (aka the truth/virtue lies in the middle) is valid also in this case.
If you are wondering, the radix economy for a language with only sillabes (sillabary language) is 3 sillabes. Radix economy takes into account the amount of sillabes it takes to write something and the amount of sillabes you need to do it.
It would be interesting to see if a baby could learn this as their first language. And if so, would they be able to speak ot just as easily as you and I speak English?
Until some language like Italian is noticed to be faster because Italian has instant text and you can just hold a button down to fly through the text boxes.
@@waldolemmer it's is actually the right form. Now, you might think an "apostrophe symbol denotes the possession of an item or anything else by the subject" and you may be right for example the word "jack's", it can be used as "Jack's clothes"; but when used on words like "it" the apostrophe symbol changes its use case to denote plurality.
@@sillicon8227 I don't think he used it to denote plurality, though, but rather possession. "Its" as posssessive form of "It" just like "His" is of "He".
Considering that he refused to use Linux to make the emoji keyboard when it would have taken him just a bit of faffing with Python, I wouldn't trust him to adequately explain this.
My roommate in my stay in the madhouse spoke like this. He spoke his own unintelligible dialect of English, that was his attempt at quashing any ambiguity from the English language, for example he'd always refer to himself as "myself" as "I" could be misinterpreted as "eye" (in that sense I suppose that makes his dialect a little more similar TO Lojban than Ithkuil as unambiguity to precedence over information density). Have been trying to get back in touch with him so that he'll have an outlet for his madness.
they wouldn't use human phonemes like this, their language would be music with thousands of instruments and octaves or movies that could be expressed through long distance radio waves...
Wow you guy have a much more advanced perception of what language could be than me. The evolution of language _is_ stunning. I actually find it weird that no other animal has evolved to create such a brilliantly high-bandwith form of communication other than human beings. My italian friend said that he loved English because you could express so much with so little; however, in everything that English gains in grammar, it loses in spelling and broken rules [there are 7 ways of pronuncing words which end in OUGH] and that pisses me off as a native speaker. Anyway, thank you for your input, I value your thoughts!
Wow! This was amazing, entertaining and mind-boggling! However, as others have pointed out, there were some *glaring* mistakes in pronunciation. This was frustrating, because these were English words, and it was in a video having to do with advanced linguistics! Just in case a few of you didn't catch the goofs, I'll go ahead and describe (in detail!) the main ones I noticed. And these happened repeatedly - especially #1 (not necessarily in order): 1. "Phoneme" - the narrator keeps saying "FEE-nome," but it's supposed to be "FOE-neem." The automated captions hung on to the correct spelling a couple of times but finally capitulated to the erroneous pronunciation. 2. "Monadic" appears on the screen correctly spelled, but the narrator says "mondaic" ("mon-DAY-ick"), when it's supposed to be "mon-AD-ick." 3. "Delimitive" appears on the screen, but the narrator says "delimitate." The correct term is clearly an adjective, but the incorrect word, the way it's pronounced, sounds like a verb. 4. "Postalveolar:" it's "post-alveolar," not "postal-veolar" - the former refers to an anatomical location in the mouth, and the latter, uh, ... what's a "veolar," and what does it have to do with the US Mail service? [Sorry! 😜] I could point out a couple of other minor details, but my comment is already way too long! Feel free to point out any mistakes *I* made!
As a rank amateur linguistics nerd this, Lojban, and its predecessor Loglan are why we should leave languages to linguists and not computer scientists. HUMANS AND COMPUTERS COMMUNICATE IN FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT WAYS.
It's been suggested but there are a lot of other conlangs with a larger community (probably, Lojban, Ido, Quenya/Sindarin, Interlingua/Interlingue/Lingua Franca Nova/etc., Toki Pona, maybe Dothraki, Na'vi, etc.) to get through before they'd ever consider Ithkuil.
Hey! Ithkuilian here (I am not fluent in it, but I am interested in the language). Nice to see that you made the video. There is a version that’s work in progress (v4) and that doesn’t have a website yet, but it is much better than v3 (the version on the website) everything is much more simple, systematic and even more expressive. The Ca chart is half a page instead of that huge chart as well as there are more words and so on. I have no idea when will it be released but great news is that it can be learnt to fluency (no one has tried it yet, but we have gotten to the conclusion that it would be harder than natural languages, but definitely doable by humans).
The documents are coagulated at www.reddit.com/r/Ithkuil/comments/mmkmbc/updates/. The do assume prior knowledge of Ithkuil's concepts, so quick access to ithkuil.net (yes, HTTP) may be useful.
@@asj3419 Ithkuil was made to be an artlang, not a language you'd actually use to communicate, but it seems what people want from this language is changing so they're making revisions
this language reminds me so much of Basque, witch also has infinite numbers of look up tables and word constructing, so though it is like 10 times wors, I think it can really be used
The phonemes must be shipped directly to you're brain by way of Boeing 787, but only after a stop over in Louisville KY, where it gets paired with the appropriate accent.
Andy from How to Make Everything went about making a language too with his community, its pretty cool how we are able to not only dynamically communicate but have the ability to fabricate new ways to do it just for the sake of doing so.
They don't have a god damn meeting of mildly informative UA-camrs every week where they come up with video subjects and assign them to the most qualified person
@@duncanhw I recognize them, but that doesn't take away from the fact it serves as a good way for people who have never looked at the subject to be exposed to it.
@@Aciel- He doesn't explain anything about conlangs though. He could have said how many people speak it (zero), what it's purpose is (not to be an actual usable language), et cetera.
I just realized that within this language, you would probably get "nickwords", words that mean an extremely specific concept in practice but within the local dialect of language would mean one thing that everyone recognizes as shared experience. It would be like an extremely specific dialect (for that shared concept or experience) of Ithkuil. My guess is that if this were ever blanketed across society, each local community would develop "minor languages" that normalize a broad group of concepts which are all agreed on by members of that community. Essentially, it will Babelize--split into an infinite number of infinitesimal languages, each of which expressing its own thoughts and ideas. I had another realization that this language is likely impossible to be a native speaker of. Even assuming every (adult) human on earth were fluent in Ithkuil, to understand the language requires an understanding of abstract concepts and the ability to discern nuanced associations between those concepts. This seems like it requires some level of metacognition that one does not gain the ability to reason about until a bit later into life. Until then relatively large portions of this language and understanding it are effectively "sealed off" to a younger brain. Very strange. What an interesting language. Somehow it reads like an intent to archive human experience. How many words of Ithkuil would span Moby Dick? Or Nietzche? Or Newton? So many questions...
I wanted to create a conlang for Demons in my novel. And it should be full of information in every word. And this conlang is an amazing example to study.
Hello and welcome to Conlang Critic, the show that gets facts wrong about YOUR favorite conlang! I’m Jan Misali and today we will be looking at the hypothetical representation of a language, Ithkuil.
This language is an agglutinative language much like my indigenous language Muysccubun (spoken my the Muyska people of the central Colombian Savannah) Its a really hard language to learn but after a while it becomes like solving a puzzle, its fun and information dense which makes conversations very interesting to witness
Wild. I do have to point out it's kinda funny you keep saying "phenome" (the set of all phenotypes in a cell, organism, etc in the field of genetics) and not "phoneme" (a unit of sound)
Am I the only one who wants to use this in D&D? As in: You finally managed to free the last of the Ithkuils from his seal. You ask him about the profecy. He answers. good luck guys.
@@wiegraf9009 but if you manage to learn it you may find ancient writings now and then - if the group is keen on exploring - that may increase your wisdom?
This development is really interesting, as an experiment to include all posible possibilities and nuances in a language. However the idea of compressing the information to the least amount of sounds doesn't make sense. It makes the language impossible to learn naturally: it had too much information density, it's like trying to learn a language with videos played at 10x. Also the language is not "noise proof" in opposition to a natural language where there is some meaning redundancy: with a natural language I may miss a sound and understand the word, or miss a word but understand the sentence by context. This language requires a supeinteligent person with perfect listening and perfect diction.
This is basically the polar opposite of Toki Pona since it's so simplified that it requires a lot of words to express specific ideas, while Ithkuil can express them in very short sentences or even one word.
A long time ago I read a science fiction novel (alas, I've forgotten both name and author) that contained something very much like this -- a race of beings with a very highly adapted language that allowed a speaker to do things like visit a factory, observe it, and come away with the ability to describe the entire factory using only a single word -- with the word containing all of the information necessary to completely reconstruct the factory.
Reminds me of the movie Arrival. The alien language was similar in that its written form was very concise (so to speak) because it had various modifiers and components you would use to build a sentence, and most sentences were the same "length" (though the writing system used circles, so maybe the same circumference?).
Not really. As far as I remember, sentences in their language had no beginning nor the end, so it started and ended at the same time, since these were the creatures of 4 dimensions (I guess). That also explains why their whole sentences looked like a circle (loop)
Imagine writing an AI to use this as the base language to communicate with. The code could be dense and precise. It's a language that values data compression. This means entire books could have a somewhat readable compressed format. If each letter was given a number similar to Unicode you could compress the entire file even further.
I just love to imagine that 1 simple syntax error would force even the most hardened supercomputer kick into overdrive mode and catch on fire! Ohh sorry, I meant: Frrœßtrã!
Fun thing with "letters" is that they are not separate symbols. They are more like hyeroglyph type of thing, that means each symbol is constructed from various parts
Perhaps Conlangs would be treated like klingon. Make the story first, then insert words as needed. Finally, once enough suckers...I mean customers are interested, flesh out the conlang and sell the phrasebook and dictionary.
This reminds me a little of playing 20 questions with my much smarter kids. One that we had to guess was the abstract nail in the proverb (I guess) about 'for want of a nail'. So not only were there categories like Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral, but there were Figurative, Hypothetical, Fictional, and various other levels of abstraction.
Feels like making the dictionary for this language would require the entire human population to work 24/7 and still take each person to be reborn 69 times.
I think part of the language is that there CAN'T be a dictionary for it because of the nature of the language. It doesn't have words in the way we think of them. You construct "words" on the fly, since a word is kind of this language's equivalent of a sentence/paragraph.
it's kind of the opposite. There are fewer than 1000 (of the 3600 potential) roots assigned meaning right now. To construct any communication possible within the language, you only need to have those 1000 roots and the tables of phoneme afixes. You wouldn't bother making a dictionary definition for every potential combination of the 1000 roots + phoneme afixes, you'd only make a dictionary entry for every root + every phoneme afix, and you users can unify the set of definitions themselves
"Conlangs", or constructed languages, are a fascinating thing because there have been so many such languages created over time, by many different people. Yet (almost) none have ever actually gained acceptance as a universal L2 language, much less to become a living language. Constructed languages combine two basic human desires: to communicate with another human, and to engineer something for efficiency - and yet apparently these two desires are at some deep level, fundamentally incompatible! I highly recommend reading "In The Land of Invented Languages" by Arika Okrent for a history / survey / one person's foray into that world. Which includes exploring the extremely small number of people who have been raised with a constructed language from childhood as a "native" language - the two most commonly learned conlangs, Esperanto and yes, Klingon.
This is like that meme of find all the meaning behind why the author used “the” in this spot, except there’s actually a full paragraph of meaning behind it and it’s actually spelled 七んę
Once politicians learn it maybe they can fit the things they try to pass through the legislative process on a few printed pages instead of a large bundle of paper that could probably be used to knock someone out. Oh and as a bonus many people won't be able to read it, so somewhat learning the language might get you into a media job to translate it into normal people words.
It means the "SH" sound as in SHip. Notice the SH sounds different if you pronounce just the first part of each word, Shoe (rounded lips) or Ship (corners of the mouth pulled back).
Fascinating subject, but hearing "phenome" so many times just killed my enthusiasm for it. It's as if he willed the concept of "phenome" into existence, and it was a combination of "phoneme" and "pheromone" that resulted in "a mispronunciation that produces an emotional or instinctive effect upon the listener separate from the actual vocalized statement".
The fact that one of the sounds is described as being pronounced "like the 'h' in 'sh-'" just makes me so angry. This is a language made by a madman for talking computers.
@@horntx Yes and no. You can kind of seperate the 'h' part of 'sh' because it is distinct from 's', but 'sh' tends to be considered as a single consonant in a lot of languages.
@@fyeahusa , exactly, like in my language, sh is a letter/consonant itself (there is actually 2-3 sh, one deeper, one lighter, and another one is, well it sometimes acts as a normal s, and sometimes as a light sh). (Bengali).
While infinitely more complex, this kind of resembles how Semitic languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew are constructed. Albeit less mind bending, these languages also feature roots, that with the help of a series of templates, pre- and suffixes can compress simple sentences into a single word. The root H.B.B / H.V.V for example constructs nouns and verbs that revolve around the general theme of love and affection (both in Hebrew and in Arabic). I can now apply a template that molds this root into a verb in first person, simple past tense: Hibavti in Hebrew, or Habet in most Arabic dialects, which means I (male) liked \ I loved respectively. Now I can add a suffix that implies an object: Hibavtia in Hebrew, Habetha in Arabic which means "I loved her" in one simple word.
It's like the roots of Semitic languages with the morphology of something like Nahuatl. To steal an example from somone else: "Nehualmoyecastemojmolunijtzinutinemisquiöni" Which means: "You, honorable people, might have come along banging your noses as to make them bleed, but you did in fact not." All built around the root "moluni", meaning bloom/boil/bleed. Honestly, if Ithkuil was less strict and less artficially economic and systemic with it's sound vocabulary it could have passed as a natural language, just one extreamly "alien" to people who are only indo-european speakers.
God, Hebrew is like a language from outer space to me and I'm already completely failing to learn that one. I used to think I'm good at languages but as I spent my youth learning European languages that have a lot of similarities I had no idea that my brain can't adapt to a Non-European language AT ALL.
@@c.w.8200 Hebrew really isn't difficult. This kind of speech isn't particularly used all of the time. It's used a lot in religious texts and news articles but from what I understand, it is a formal way of talking that isn't really used conversationally very often. Hebrew is a language that tries to go out of it's way to make it easier on the speaker. Reading it is actually very simple and the root system is pretty logical. I'm a native English speaker and I haven't found Hebrew difficult at all.
@@aaroncohen2700 uh do u rlly think he was trying to sound professional? Plz dont be a language nerd...we all know but its just to be quick. Or did i miss a joke
If we could one day instantly transfer any language in our brain, this language would genuinely be the best ever. As you have a vast knowledge of concepts and an insane precision accessible to you, it would be just perfect to describe simply pretty much anything without having the disadvantage of learning the language.
If you could insurgent transfer language to your brain, you'd want a much more exact language than this. Binary would probably be best. Everything is either true or false.
@@chrismanuel9768 organic brains do not operate on computer logic, nor do natural languages. The amount of overhead that you would have to generate to describe any kind of abstract idea that lacks an objective truth value would makes such a language functionally useless unless you had a brain computer interface acting as the interpreter while your brain was given the output to process. Precision means nothing if the usability factor is next to non-existent.
@@Thuazabi "precisions means nothing if the usability factor is next to non-existent" Like trying to use a bolt-action sniper rifle in a close-range sub-machine gun / pistol fight. Sometimes you just gotta do what works and works RIGHT NOW even if it's not perfect. Mother nature has her own raw efficiency.
I don't think the human brain could even keep up with 'words' that mean as much as entire pages during a conversation... This isn't meant for regular speaking anyway, since languages will always prefer simplicity and comprehension. It'd be much better to learn something like Esperanto, a beautiful, exact language that was also artificially made.
~1:58 it literally compares the sound to the sh's in "shoeshine" right there, you don't need to know what all of the terms mean to get an idea of how you're supposed to say it
“A voiceless non-labialized lamino-postalveolar dorso-palatal grooved sibilant fricative”
He is just talking about “sh”
worst part: the IPA representation is right at the end of the line he read
even worse part: it says how you're supposed to pronounce it at the start of said line
š
@@dejv0000 ʃ
Talking about standard linguistics like it's some quirky shit.
Ş
Drunk Glasgow man is the worlds most complicated language actually.
Old Welsh drunk grandpa.
@@viktorhalaj3029 Old welsh drunk grandpa having an argument with their Irish wife on the street next to my flat.
@@me4pie so how does it feel like occasionally listening to aliens communicate?
Drunk Berliner trying to speak English is also complicated
Drunk french trying to talk about politics after being punched in his teeth
Now imagine Aliens finding Ithkuil and trying to decipher it, thinking we were incredibly intelligent, complex beings.
It’s certainly better for communicating with us than “give weapon”.
@@magicmulder I got that reference.
@@Pining_for_the_fjords Military dude: "They said something like itxapodúrxameeshnoput."
Linguist: "Oh, 'We have come to procure you with the necessary language skills to be practically able to fully master the time dimension with the peaceful intention to enable you to help us in the far future'".
@@Pining_for_the_fjords the short story was nice too.
@@twitchygene614 Arrival. :)
I think this would make a neat "spell incantation" language since part of the very idea of magic words is that they are extremely specific and information dense. Also, the idea of the language being incomprehensible to those without special training is another common trope.
It also addresses the super specific pronunciations which are equally present where just even a wrong inflection can mess up a spell (take Harry Potters infamous "leviosa not leviosaaa")
The problem here is actually writing it. It would be a huge unnecessary time sink in the writing process when writing already often requires a whole lot of research to try and sound intelligent about topics the writer is personally unfamiliar with. There is a reason most writers don't try and pull a Tolkien despite how cool it might seem to make your own language for your world.
Oh, *come on*, man, don't make me want to learn Ithkuil just to make my D&D campaign more realistic!
Very cool idea. It might be more fun to just pretend your D&D Sorcerer has knowledge of this kind of language.
From "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" (The wizard's book):
"A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer's idea of a spirit. It cannot be seen or touched. It is not composed of matter at all. However, it is very real. It can perform intellectual work. It can answer questions. It can affect the world by disbursing money at a bank or by controlling a robot arm in a factory. The programs we use to conjure processes are like a sorcerer's spells. They are carefully composed in arcane and esoteric _programming languages_ that prescribe the tasks we want our processes to perform".
Honestly why your idea isn't a thing in fantasy can be attributed to the fact that writers are _writers,_ not computer scientists or linguists (save for a certain guy who wrote a story about some dwarfs...)
A dumb idea occurred to me: A fantasy book in which spells are cast using actual programming languages (or just a language in general) , and the book itself is structured like a language course. We follow a young wizard apprentice learning the language and eventually saving the world... WHY IS THAT NOT A THING??? IT BASICALLY WRITES ITSELF!!!
"Which means I must stress the final syllable." Immediately after that the presenter pronounces the word with the stress on the initial syllable.
My favorite part of the video.
I read this while that part of the vedio was playing Oh my God
He mispronounces many of the terms in the video.
I, to this day, do not know exactly how grammatical stress works so I don't blame him.
My question is how does one pronounce the finally syllable while also maintain a falling tone.
These kind of cancel each other out don't they?
For awhile I wondered why some languages were so fast and long and they couldn’t be short and precise, now I realize why. this is pain inducing
Yep, this is why. It's because language is used by societies, and the average intelligence and understanding of any group goes down as the size of the group increases. This is also why jargon is a thing - a group of post-doc linguists have no problem deciphering what is a voiceless non-labialised etc. etc. sibilant fricative, but the general population is going to struggle.
Any language is only as complex as it can be understood by the dumbest people in a large group.
@@Ealsante So you're saying you're the reason language is getting simpler?
@@Mercure250 Yeah. Just check our presidents out.
@@Mercure250 simpler AND much more practical
@@michaeltagor4238 Yup. But the paradox of language is that things get simpler without actually getting simpler. If it simplifies in some aspect, it gets more complicated in another. For instance, English lost its morphological complexity in exchange for syntactical complexity. This paradox is the reason languages change all the time.
Ithkuil looks like the result of an AI developing a language for humans. Complete with lookup tables incorporating all the sounds that a human can make in an efficient grid. Ease of use and was definitely not a concern.
I thought a similiar vein too. Kinda like a language that AI can use to cross interface with English (and all the languages on earth eventually), that will be precise, complex, and directly relatable for computer AI to eventually communicate “effectively” with humans thru reading, writing, speaking, even just thinking or on Musk’s Neurolink etc. It will allow androids, robots, AI, computers, humans, and maybe eventually animals I bet to communicate thoughts and feelings, ideas, statements, questions, answers etc in their language that the AI will decode/incode etc. Fascinating yet also unnerving like Skynet will be on its way, and could communicate thru those huge giant LCD digital tower giant screens that will broadcast any person, idol, celebrity, politician, dead or alive, onto the LCD screen as a digital giant future ruler that will simultaneously communicate with people around the globe 🌎.
Yeah, the AI considers all the sounds a human can make, but not whether we WANT to make those sounds.
(Nightmare image of human in blacklight hooked up to a blood-greasy rack with electrodes all over it, and an AI voice saying, "Come on, do the French nasal vowels, it's not so hard!")
@@Dracopol to be fair, nasal vowels are not hard
@@Matty002 No? Nasal vowels are not that common. In European languages I think only French, Portuguese and Galician have them. Oh, wait, Polish has 2, ą and ę, but they are no longer pronounced all the time where they are spelled.
They are a corruption where an "N" used to be pronounced after a vowel. They reek of decay. French has 4 kinds, but in France itself it may be retreating to only 3 types. "Un bon vin blanc!" It is a mystic art, to pronounce the N without actually pronouncing the N!
@@Dracopol i know what nasal vowels are, i speak french.
what does them being common have to do with anything?
your fake AI said 'hard' not common. lowering your velum while articulating a vowel is not hard. there are even english dialects with nasal vowels.
a trilled uvilar R is hard
This is the kind of language you would get if word cost $300 each.
Even if everyone in the world magically forgot every language, and magically learned this one, this language wouldn't last. Just from usage, it would immediately begin to rapidly simplify and become something very different from its original.
Yep. Languages must reach a balance between speakers and listeners and this language feels speaker heavy! I don't really feel it was ever intended to be a human language, but a language a computer would love!
@@sion8 I think it would be a good language to write policy in. Like laws and other legal documents, so that there's less room for interpretation. Also, a feel as though there's going to be a Bible translation, if there's not already.
@@daniel.santos
🤣 I'm not sure, but maybe. I'm looking at the Wikipedia article of this language and the creator never intended this language to be used as everyday conversation, but for fields like philosophy "to be used for more elaborate and profound fields where more insightful thoughts are expected", that's apparently what he has said about it.
@@sion8 So... Someone really should translate the bible.
That's true. Languages will ALWAYS prioritize efficiency and simplicity over accuracy. After all, that's where context clues come into play anyway. A language this convoluted would never survive in this form in a natural environment, even with no alternatives.
This language is genius, why bother with text compression when you can just compress your whole language.
And People on twitter would love this language, it would give them even more characters to bully people
imagine having to write a 10 page essay in this
I’ve also been making an information-condensing language called Qala. Here’s an example:
English: The car exploded!
Qala: Xaat’â!
@@wyntyrr Can you break Xaatâ down for me?
@@wyntyrr wait so is ðe /aa/ þing supposed to be an indication of a long vowel or is ðere some rule ðat dictates ðat ðe glottal stop is automatically placed between two vowels?
Edit: or maybe it's someþing i can't þink of aðm
@@ghostguy0o0 “Aa” is pronounced /ɑː/, yes.
This would be a perfect April fools video if it was fake.
@EyeZackZin everything around you which you sense feel see or perceive
Is created by some person
@@rajeshsahu3574 i'd like to make a complaint against the man who made the weather then
how do you know it isn't?
@@darkpixel1128 haha, this is way funnier to me than it's supposed to be
It's like this was all done up as an elaborate April fool's joke, but they forgot to set up a translation for "hey, I was just joking", and so now we have a weirdly complex language.
A language actually with phenomes (differentiable smells) would be amazing
*confesses feelings by gradually increasing the hydrogen sulfide concentration in my fart*
Pheromones
SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT
alot of insects do this, like ants, and the geks in no mans sky use it kinda
Fun fact: Not one person can fluently speak Ithkuil, even the creator. So maybe you could be the first!
i dont think anyone wants to memorize hundreds of thousands of tables to make weird noises nobdy but them understand
Maybe Xioma, he learns languages
@@prisma. yes but what if we captured a child and taught them this language from a young age. Like imagine how would a child that has only known ikthul all their life learn English?
@@yoyu1001 they would be so confused as to why our language is so drawn out and imprecise
Over my dead body
It is impossible to place implied or subtle meanings in this language because it's basically designed to convey messages in the most exact and comprehensive ways possible.
They should've added a phoneme for 'if you catch my drift'
Ah but just because the language is precise, it doesn't mean the writer/speaker has to be. You can still be ironic or change the grammar, using formal/informal or the wrong case on purpose for effect? Also, slang would be interesting...
Imagine the poetry in this langauge
@@demonschnauzer1555 There isn't any. Not can there be . . . other than doggerel, limericks, and maybe haiku.
@@joshuaoehler5796 I would agree, but I think it would probably still be possible to create poetry with hidden or multiple meanings in this language given that metaphors exist and also we will never be able to come up with a language that actually perfectly describes every single thing, so some things will be left unexplained, and you could make poetry with those things. Also, things can be said “incorrectly” for the purpose of art.
This is the language you use to write on the one note card you can use on a test
It would take more effort in deciphering the language than studying for the test.
ngl, just because of this comment I now kinda wanna learn this language
Unironically, if you did that it would help you loads actually remembering and internalizing the material. Because the language is so dense and filled with context a lot of thought needs to be put into what the context of the words you write is. Writing in Ithkuil necessitates actually understanding what it is you want to say, so by the time you've finished writing your cheat sheet in Ithkuil you probably don't need the cheat sheet anymore.
@@DaveTheVader which is the main function of the notecard anyway. The promise of "easy/free" information available to you during the test is just a trick to get you to sit down and actually study
@@breadtubediet1524 That goes without saying.
"And now I must stress the final syllable"
Immediately proceeds to stress the first syllable instead
HAI: complains that “voiceless non-labialized lamino-postalveolar dorso-palatal grooved sibilant fricative” tells him nothing
IPA [ʃ] right there: am I a joke to you?
SSHHH! Don't tell him.
@@ExtantThylacine hahaha
.....i may be dumb, but that symbol also tells me nothing
@@DeadBread. It's the 'sh' sound as in 'shake'.
My [ʃ] is labialized. Many people's is; it helps exaggerate the distinction from [s].
as a linguist this "phenome" thing is really driving me up the wall
Yeah, and making that kind of mistake in a video specifically about language is...not great for credibility.
It hurts my soul and makes me doubt that Sam really knows any amount about the things he's talking.
Same
He also mispronounced "monadic" as "mondaic". Sloppy.
@@Abigail-hu5wf You're a fool if you thought he's been writing his own videos this whole time - at this point he's a narrator for a research team. They probably do know what they are talking about, he doesn't and that makes him mispronounce but doesn't impeach the credibility of the whole video. They do need better QC tho
the rampant mispronunciation is just a cherry on top making sure, we, the audience, never forget that this video was, in fact, narrated by a dweeb
phenome
Mondaic
longuistics... In the curiositystream ad.
Now say this in Ithkuil.
SHA POWT LAY
As a linguist, all the mixing up of the "morpheme" and "phoneme" concepts in this video slightly triggers me, but I love how this video actually builds a word as an example for us. It is great. (By the way, you guys showed how the word should be stressed in the last syllable, but your final pronuntiation stressed the penultime syllable. It's still great, though, I just noticed it the second time around).
Also, lots of the things here are suprasegmental stuff, and I have no idea on how the morpheme concept works with supragmental stuff. I'll assume it is pretty much the same as it is for segments, but if any fellow linguist would explain this to me, I'd be thankful.
I think it’s incorrect to say ‘as a linguist, it triggers me’. Should be ‘As a linguist, I find it annoying’. So that the subject of the 2nd part is the same thing that you refer to in the 1st part. As a linguist, I find THIS frustrating.
@@erynn9968As a linguist, you oughtn't subscribe to such prescriptive grammar rules. Dangling modifiers are dispreferred but they are hardly ever actually ambiguous; in fact, I often analyze them as being akin to a topic, like Japanese "wa" phrases.
@@erynn9968 Prescriptivism at its finest.
As a not-linguist, I have no idea what this reply chain says.
@@asheep7797 In pop linguistic spaces such as this, prescriptivism (the idea that there are certain correct ways to do language) is still quite entrenched even though it's long obsolete in professional Linguistics (this is one of the ways where pop science lags behind actual science)
This is all contrasted with descriptivism which is the idea that a language is what its speakers are speaking it as, and that a linguists job is to study and describe that, rather than impose arbitrary rules as an authority figure (which'd be prescriptivism).
If you were in English speaking public schooling than most likely you've come across a few cases here and there of like 'then vs than' or 'don't use *can* use *may*' or you might have gotten it from your parents as well (prescriptivism in other languages is of course also a thing but there I lack knowledge as to specific examples)
Text on the screen: "MONADIC"
Sam: "Mondaic"
Me: dying inside every time he says it
I think Ithkuil broke him; he forgot how to read
You just want to say it like you first read it
By this point, he doesn't care
Also Sam pronouncing it “phenomes” instead of “phonemes”
no way xenoblade chronicles reference
HAI: “linguistics sucks and we will never make a video on it again.”
also HAI:
Hey, it's AxxL, an extremely famous bot known for invading in big channels, promoting his own channel while also saying some incomprehensible garbage and thinks he's gonna be a big name without putting in the effort with his videos and such. Don't you've a life that's not self promotion? With that time you waste, you'd've a decent but loyal following.
@@AxxLAfriku what
@@AxxLAfriku How's your weed smoking girlfriends?
@@GoinGreninja I believe he is indeed a real person and does seem to be writing quite a lot of these texts by himself (also indicated by that typo in OPs Name he wanted to recite). He has been doing this shtick for years, firstly only under bigger German channels (I think it somehow worked out, a bigger UA-camr reacted to his channel giving a considerable boost...), but he does seem to be going international for quite some while now. It does seem to work though...
@@Mimi.1001 That may be true but whether or not he's a real person, doing this much self promotion is still a very scummy move. And of course, just because he's successful with this 'tactic', that doesn't mean his audience will stay on because of his content and character.
This seems like something Tom Scott would have "fun" with....
Would actually tell us about it instead of saying I dunno
That would be fun. I will probably send it to him. You should do so as well.
I wonder what xnopyt means in Ithkuil...
lol
He's an actual linguist so he would hate it
A similar conlang was described in the 1949 story "Gulf" by Robert Heinlein. The major problem with such a language is the lack of redundancy. Any mispronunciation, mishearing, speech impediment, tone-deafness, noisy environment or low-quality communications technology, means serious miscommunication.
which is why languages like this would be perfect if they only existed on paper rather than have people actually try and speak them.
@@fieryr
A single spelling or typing mistake will change the whole meaning completely.
@@condorianonegdiffsgoku that's a skill issue on your part though
also you can just invent a language with thousands of symbols distinct enough, or composed by multiple simpler symbols. just look at chinese or hindi.
Ithkuil is not designed to mimick Robert Heinlein's Speedtalk, that common misconception Quijada actually responds to in his FAQ. Whereas Heinlein's Speedtalk is focused on compression, Ithkuil instead is intended to convey as much cognitive intent and semantic nuance/exactitude per morpheme.
These super-information-dense languages seem great until you try to actually use them. Packing so much information into so little space with no redundancy means any minor error or damage can create a valid, but incorrect word. So you send a nice formal letter to your boss only to be fired because a smudge turned "working for you" into "screwing your mom".
In English this can still happen ("car" and "can" differ by only a fraction of a letter), but usually there's enough redundancy that you can infer what the damaged/wrong worm was suposed to be, even if you omitted a letter entirely like I just did, or used the wrong word. Even if you an entire word it can still be understood.
Yeah, it's impressive that we can make the model maximum precision languages but in practice they'd be terribly inefficient.
Our brains have evolved to infer and deduce meaning from an imprecise statement.
TL;DR: Subconscious mind waaaaay ahead of you.
I accidentally the entire watermelon.
Yeah, but pretty sure Ithkuil has quite a bit of redundancy itself. It is information dense, but that doesn't necessarily make it "efficient" in the context of conversation or everyday life. The grammar requires *much* more syntactic information to express semantic ideas than natural languages. What this means is there's a large amount of redundancy baked into the grammar, which probably means it isn't any less understandable or comprehensible in the presence of signal errors than any other language.
lolll
Who actually thinks these are good? Good for what? If they were good, human languages would resemble them. Language is literally only useful because we use it
A few corrections: it's "phoneme" not "phenome", a voiceless non-labialised lamino-postalveolar Dorso-palatal grooved sibilant fricative is basically the "sh" sound (IPA: [ʃ]) and the "possessive" case in English is actually called the "genitive".
The worst part is it literally says "As in English shoeshine without rounding the lips" so basically I think with my inferiour linguistics as in "ship" right at the beggining of the actual sentence
4:00. Is it Mondaic or Monadic?
@@marioluigi9599 monadic
Thanks for posting this comment, the pronunciation of phoneme made me question my sanity for a minute...I had that feeling like when you find out you've been singing the wrong song lyric in front of everybody for years lol.
Came here to correct “phoneme” haha. I knew right away there were no linguists involved in the making of this video.
Every time he says “phenomes” I feel pain
Imagine this language inside video games or series to hide lore.
The 1st text font would also work in a cyberpunk style
The amount of times he said "phenome" actually made me doubt he wasn't just mispronouncing "phoneme". He was.
Sounds like somebody wanted revenge on their latin teacher.
Then the inventor sends his language to his teacher, that would be the greatest thing I’ve ever heard
Lol
Is your PFP the oldest meme!?
*+*
Why would I want to do that she’s awesome
Now do a video on Toki Pona, the world's simplest con-lang.
Toki pona - created to help with depression
This monstrosity - killed everyone who attempted to learn it
I studied toki pona at school!
You have got to be about the most superficial commentator on con-languages since the idiotic B. Gilson.
Did I miss the one where you said which conlang you’re fluent in and read at least three times a week and can read new books in every week of even one year or listen to radio shows in every week? New radio shows?
toki pona li pona mute
@@kalabuk1678 who are you responding to? OP has no content on their channel, (i don't even think that what you're saying is relevant to what they said, they just said that Toki Pona is simple), and no one else said anything related to what you're saying? did the original preson that you're replying to delete their comment? if so, ok, but who are you even talking to?
I want to have a single, A4 paper filled with small Ithkuil text framed on my bedroom wall.
-"What is that?"
+"Oh, that?
Its the whole of Lord of the Rings hexalogy"
This language is the most efficient if you look at how much few words can say, but also the less efficient language if you look at how much work you have to make just one word.
well, if you had to fit a full novel on a piece of paper, then it would be very efficient
if you actually had to write said novel, not so efficient
@@darkpixel1128 Exactly, it's a very weird concept for a language and I'd say that the motto "Virtus in medio stat" (aka the truth/virtue lies in the middle) is valid also in this case.
If you are wondering, the radix economy for a language with only sillabes (sillabary language) is 3 sillabes. Radix economy takes into account the amount of sillabes it takes to write something and the amount of sillabes you need to do it.
This would be perfect if you have supercomputers connected by cans with string that need to communicate.
It would be interesting to see if a baby could learn this as their first language. And if so, would they be able to speak ot just as easily as you and I speak English?
drinking game: drink every time sam mispronounces something
Warning: incipient death.
ÔKSNORMIE
You'd have to have 4 shot glasses for 1:48.
@@fyorr110 that one line could put someone in a coma
I don't want to die right now, thank you
So it’s sentences are really short? Oh man ithkuil translations of games would become dominant in speedrunning if they existed...
Oh hi Marisa
@@waldolemmer Autocorrect switches “its” to “it’s”
Until some language like Italian is noticed to be faster because Italian has instant text and you can just hold a button down to fly through the text boxes.
@@waldolemmer it's is actually the right form. Now, you might think an "apostrophe symbol denotes the possession of an item or anything else by the subject" and you may be right for example the word "jack's", it can be used as "Jack's clothes"; but when used on words like "it" the apostrophe symbol changes its use case to denote plurality.
@@sillicon8227 I don't think he used it to denote plurality, though, but rather possession. "Its" as posssessive form of "It" just like "His" is of "He".
Hearing "phonemes" being said as "phenomes" and š being pronounced as s instead of sh had me rolling on the floor 😂
At least my native language (Czech) has the "sh" sound as "š", which is the same as in this language lol
Damn, where's Tom Scott when you need him...
Considering that he refused to use Linux to make the emoji keyboard when it would have taken him just a bit of faffing with Python, I wouldn't trust him to adequately explain this.
@@Blue-Maned_Hawk what?
@@Blue-Maned_Hawk can you say it in, uh, more detail
@@t0x1cl preferably in English
@@Blue-Maned_Hawk He is literally a linguist though. Many of his videos are chock full of linguistics.
When I imagine how hyper-evolved beings from another planet would speak, this language would be the answer.
My roommate in my stay in the madhouse spoke like this. He spoke his own unintelligible dialect of English, that was his attempt at quashing any ambiguity from the English language, for example he'd always refer to himself as "myself" as "I" could be misinterpreted as "eye" (in that sense I suppose that makes his dialect a little more similar TO Lojban than Ithkuil as unambiguity to precedence over information density). Have been trying to get back in touch with him so that he'll have an outlet for his madness.
they wouldn't use human phonemes like this, their language would be music with thousands of instruments and octaves or movies that could be expressed through long distance radio waves...
Wow you guy have a much more advanced perception of what language could be than me. The evolution of language _is_ stunning. I actually find it weird that no other animal has evolved to create such a brilliantly high-bandwith form of communication other than human beings. My italian friend said that he loved English because you could express so much with so little; however, in everything that English gains in grammar, it loses in spelling and broken rules [there are 7 ways of pronuncing words which end in OUGH] and that pisses me off as a native speaker.
Anyway, thank you for your input, I value your thoughts!
I will never complain about Latin again... :/
Maybe the Heptapods from Arrival will be able to speak it...
Ahaha
Ha. You should try Cantonese. It's like speaking in French and reading/writing in Latin.
Heck, even aliens or not even God can read it
@@RaymondHng 😂You gave me so much perspective as I can read both Latin and French.
@@RaymondHng Right? I saw that Ithkuil had 7 tones and thought, 'Pathetic. Hokkien has 15 and Cantonese has 22.'
Wow! This was amazing, entertaining and mind-boggling! However, as others have pointed out, there were some *glaring* mistakes in pronunciation. This was frustrating, because these were English words, and it was in a video having to do with advanced linguistics!
Just in case a few of you didn't catch the goofs, I'll go ahead and describe (in detail!) the main ones I noticed. And these happened repeatedly - especially #1 (not necessarily in order):
1. "Phoneme" - the narrator keeps saying "FEE-nome," but it's supposed to be "FOE-neem." The automated captions hung on to the correct spelling a couple of times but finally capitulated to the erroneous pronunciation.
2. "Monadic" appears on the screen correctly spelled, but the narrator says "mondaic" ("mon-DAY-ick"), when it's supposed to be "mon-AD-ick."
3. "Delimitive" appears on the screen, but the narrator says "delimitate." The correct term is clearly an adjective, but the incorrect word, the way it's pronounced, sounds like a verb.
4. "Postalveolar:" it's "post-alveolar," not "postal-veolar" - the former refers to an anatomical location in the mouth, and the latter, uh, ... what's a "veolar," and what does it have to do with the US Mail service? [Sorry! 😜]
I could point out a couple of other minor details, but my comment is already way too long! Feel free to point out any mistakes *I* made!
wdym pronounced like a verb?
@@Bruhh221 they meant that, in English, the "-ate" ending is typically used for verbs (i.e. locate, desecrate, abbreviate)
Also, š is pronounced as sh, as in shush.
Good comment, needs to be higher
you are very smart
Imagine spending a week doing research for this video but not bothering to check how the word "phoneme" is pronounced.
Kotor did that shit too
..or learning basic IPA to find out that /ʃ/ is pronounced just like English .
oʊksʌɹn
Or that "monadic" isn't pronounced "mondaic".
PHENOMES (my linguistics hurts)
labialized as "labby-lised"
As someone with a degree in linguistics, this made me want to paint the wall with my brains.
P H E N O M E S
Same just same
As a rank amateur linguistics nerd this, Lojban, and its predecessor Loglan are why we should leave languages to linguists and not computer scientists. HUMANS AND COMPUTERS COMMUNICATE IN FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT WAYS.
But the question that needs answering is this: Is it a brick wall?
Same but, i havent watchef the video yet
I'm guessing soon Duolingo will email me with their new available language...
It's simple everyone
Spanish or *Vanish*
Japanese or break the knees
It's been suggested but there are a lot of other conlangs with a larger community (probably, Lojban, Ido, Quenya/Sindarin, Interlingua/Interlingue/Lingua Franca Nova/etc., Toki Pona, maybe Dothraki, Na'vi, etc.) to get through before they'd ever consider Ithkuil.
@@AzraelGnosis Meanwhile there's me, an idiot who learned Esperanto just for it to practically vanish
@@AzraelGnosis it was a joke
I love how this video is out of date now that New Ithkuil just dropped
homestuck spotted
Hey! Ithkuilian here (I am not fluent in it, but I am interested in the language). Nice to see that you made the video. There is a version that’s work in progress (v4) and that doesn’t have a website yet, but it is much better than v3 (the version on the website) everything is much more simple, systematic and even more expressive. The Ca chart is half a page instead of that huge chart as well as there are more words and so on. I have no idea when will it be released but great news is that it can be learnt to fluency (no one has tried it yet, but we have gotten to the conclusion that it would be harder than natural languages, but definitely doable by humans).
i don't think anybody is fluent in ithkuil.
I find it absolutely hilarious that after decades and 4 revisions people can finally plausibly learn to use the language.
The documents are coagulated at www.reddit.com/r/Ithkuil/comments/mmkmbc/updates/. The do assume prior knowledge of Ithkuil's concepts, so quick access to ithkuil.net (yes, HTTP) may be useful.
@@asj3419 Ithkuil was made to be an artlang, not a language you'd actually use to communicate, but it seems what people want from this language is changing so they're making revisions
His 1 word in that language equaled 1 paragraph in English I like it cuts down on the writing and probably most mistakes. I’m interested.
Drink every time he says “phenomes” instead of “phonemes”.
But I need my liver to not explode
@@bcdm999 no you dont, you need phenomes
It’s making my eye twitch
this killed me
Or "mondaic" instead of "monadic"
As an English-speaker learning Russian, when you said there are 96 cases, I had to hold back tears. 6 is bad enough.
You mean 9?)))
@@Яна-мамба or 15, or whatever the true historical number is.
Just use quizlet to memorize all the case endings :]
It's the verbs of motion that'll kill you in Russian.
Hungarian has 26.
this language reminds me so much of Basque, witch also has infinite numbers of look up tables and word constructing, so though it is like 10 times wors, I think it can really be used
4:22 When language has space time continuum diagram to explain it
Next video on Wendover Productions:
The Logistics of Making Words in the World’s Most Complicated Language
The phonemes must be shipped directly to you're brain by way of Boeing 787, but only after a stop over in Louisville KY, where it gets paired with the appropriate accent.
@@centurion1945 always find a way to work a plane in every wendover video. Even if you have to use a Toyota Corolla reference to get there
I do think that a more in-depth video is deserved on the topic.
*video of jets on a tarmac* Ithkuil... Has... A problem...
Yeah, no shit, @@JouvaMoufette . Anyone who's bothered to think about the descriptions of the roots can realize that.
Perfect for spellcasting and writing books, I can finally write an entire book on a single page.
Andy from How to Make Everything went about making a language too with his community, its pretty cool how we are able to not only dynamically communicate but have the ability to fabricate new ways to do it just for the sake of doing so.
I feel like Tom Scott is better qualified for this video topic.
They don't have a god damn meeting of mildly informative UA-camrs every week where they come up with video subjects and assign them to the most qualified person
@@Laittth You mean to tell me there isn't a secret society of mildly informative UA-camrs?
@@tahaabbas1236 reality is often disappointing 😞
And he’d do it in one take
I feel like my coffee mug would be better qualified for this video topic.
As someone that got interested in linguistics through conlangs, seeing a video on one by a popular UA-camr makes me unreasonably happy.
Sendube!
Then surely you recognise all the mistakes?
@@duncanhw I recognize them, but that doesn't take away from the fact it serves as a good way for people who have never looked at the subject to be exposed to it.
@@Aciel- He doesn't explain anything about conlangs though. He could have said how many people speak it (zero), what it's purpose is (not to be an actual usable language), et cetera.
I just realized that within this language, you would probably get "nickwords", words that mean an extremely specific concept in practice but within the local dialect of language would mean one thing that everyone recognizes as shared experience. It would be like an extremely specific dialect (for that shared concept or experience) of Ithkuil. My guess is that if this were ever blanketed across society, each local community would develop "minor languages" that normalize a broad group of concepts which are all agreed on by members of that community. Essentially, it will Babelize--split into an infinite number of infinitesimal languages, each of which expressing its own thoughts and ideas.
I had another realization that this language is likely impossible to be a native speaker of. Even assuming every (adult) human on earth were fluent in Ithkuil, to understand the language requires an understanding of abstract concepts and the ability to discern nuanced associations between those concepts. This seems like it requires some level of metacognition that one does not gain the ability to reason about until a bit later into life. Until then relatively large portions of this language and understanding it are effectively "sealed off" to a younger brain. Very strange.
What an interesting language. Somehow it reads like an intent to archive human experience. How many words of Ithkuil would span Moby Dick? Or Nietzche? Or Newton? So many questions...
Someone needs to translate the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.
You've just described Arabic and it's dialects
The second realization you talked about is exactly what i was thinking too
I wanted to create a conlang for Demons in my novel. And it should be full of information in every word. And this conlang is an amazing example to study.
Only Mordons would speak this...
make sure to look at thandian as well
My eyes twitched at every pronunciation of 'phenomes.'
So what you're telling me is that it's perfect for translating sentences between languages.
Think Esperanto might do the trick
@@WinteressNavja why esperanto?
@@Najmulo Based of many languages, was suppoused to be international, grammar without any exceptions.
@@WinteressNavja *based on european languages
@@Najmulo so?
Hello and welcome to Conlang Critic, the show that gets facts wrong about YOUR favorite conlang! I’m Jan Misali and today we will be looking at the hypothetical representation of a language, Ithkuil.
i got this reference
ｖｏｔｇｉｌ
Anthony McCarthy is quaking right now
@@PaynesCupcakes I'm a little bit excited
qʰûl-lysvukšei-arpîptó’ks go brr
This language is an agglutinative language much like my indigenous language Muysccubun (spoken my the Muyska people of the central Colombian Savannah)
Its a really hard language to learn but after a while it becomes like solving a puzzle, its fun and information dense which makes conversations very interesting to witness
I think it is more polysynthetic because tons of morphemes can be fitted into a single word, making a sentence.
Don't let this distract you from the fact that Mr Krabs sold Spongebob’s soul for 62 cents.
spngbob
Thanks I almost forgot
@@Kromiball spungbob
Spinigebob
Spinachbob
The way you pronounce 'phoneme' actually scares me, but I'm happy you covered this incredible conlang.
Sad state of affairs that your comment has gone unnoticed.
Wild. I do have to point out it's kinda funny you keep saying "phenome" (the set of all phenotypes in a cell, organism, etc in the field of genetics) and not "phoneme" (a unit of sound)
And "mondaic", and "labby lised", and the hundreds of other mistakes
Sounds like somebody tried making every noise they possibly could with their mouth and said “that sounds like a language to me”
georgian be like
Am I the only one who wants to use this in D&D?
As in: You finally managed to free the last of the Ithkuils from his seal. You ask him about the profecy. He answers.
good luck guys.
You’re a mean dm
def make this language an "exotic" one.
You have to permanently lose one INT to learn this language because it takes so much brain power
@@wiegraf9009 but if you manage to learn it you may find ancient writings now and then - if the group is keen on exploring - that may increase your wisdom?
@@wisteria3032 Yeah I could definitely imagine that happening, like in Planescape: Torment!
1:05 "phenomes"?!?!?!?!??!?!?!! oh this one is going in the yearly inaccuracy compilation just you wait
Also he said the final syllable was stressed, then stressed the first syllable in the final pronunciation
Not gonna lie, for a video that mentions hundreds of linguistic words, “phenomes” is a real head-scratcher
And what's up with "delimitate" at 4:31
Its phoneme 😢
HAI forgot how to pronounce phonemes. But hey we all know what a new language can do to old ones.
not just the word but the phonemes themselves. It's a common issue he has.
This development is really interesting, as an experiment to include all posible possibilities and nuances in a language. However the idea of compressing the information to the least amount of sounds doesn't make sense. It makes the language impossible to learn naturally: it had too much information density, it's like trying to learn a language with videos played at 10x.
Also the language is not "noise proof" in opposition to a natural language where there is some meaning redundancy: with a natural language I may miss a sound and understand the word, or miss a word but understand the sentence by context.
This language requires a supeinteligent person with perfect listening and perfect diction.
it's not intended to be a language that is learnable or usable "naturally". It's goal is to simultaneously maximize information and minimize sound.
Your [language developers] were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.
This is basically the polar opposite of Toki Pona since it's so simplified that it requires a lot of words to express specific ideas, while Ithkuil can express them in very short sentences or even one word.
HAI: "Why sound description so long?"
IPA Symbol: "sssshhhhhhh"
A long time ago I read a science fiction novel (alas, I've forgotten both name and author) that contained something very much like this -- a race of beings with a very highly adapted language that allowed a speaker to do things like visit a factory, observe it, and come away with the ability to describe the entire factory using only a single word -- with the word containing all of the information necessary to completely reconstruct the factory.
Reminds me of the movie Arrival. The alien language was similar in that its written form was very concise (so to speak) because it had various modifiers and components you would use to build a sentence, and most sentences were the same "length" (though the writing system used circles, so maybe the same circumference?).
that was an insane movie.
Not really. As far as I remember, sentences in their language had no beginning nor the end, so it started and ended at the same time, since these were the creatures of 4 dimensions (I guess). That also explains why their whole sentences looked like a circle (loop)
@@cardboarddignity :D
Imagine writing an AI to use this as the base language to communicate with. The code could be dense and precise. It's a language that values data compression. This means entire books could have a somewhat readable compressed format. If each letter was given a number similar to Unicode you could compress the entire file even further.
Or maybe we could make an ai that would be the first ever thing in existence that could speak this language with proper pronunciation
I just love to imagine that 1 simple syntax error would force even the most hardened supercomputer kick into overdrive mode and catch on fire!
Ohh sorry, I meant: Frrœßtrã!
Fun thing with "letters" is that they are not separate symbols. They are more like hyeroglyph type of thing, that means each symbol is constructed from various parts
too many features
dl would work but idk 😂
Now imagine an error.
Me: “I want to make a Conlang!”
Conglangs:
Don't worry, take baby steps
Hey at the very least it's better than VötGil
Perhaps Conlangs would be treated like klingon. Make the story first, then insert words as needed. Finally, once enough suckers...I mean customers are interested, flesh out the conlang and sell the phrasebook and dictionary.
@@리주민 don't forget the grammar part jfc
Brenden Pearson (Zillyhoolio) VötGil is VötGwd
This reminds me a little of playing 20 questions with my much smarter kids. One that we had to guess was the abstract nail in the proverb (I guess) about 'for want of a nail'. So not only were there categories like Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral, but there were Figurative, Hypothetical, Fictional, and various other levels of abstraction.
You are the very model of a modern Major-General. You've information vegetable, animal, and mineral.
And also hypothetical, figurative, and fictional.
Feels like making the dictionary for this language would require the entire human population to work 24/7 and still take each person to be reborn 69 times.
I think part of the language is that there CAN'T be a dictionary for it because of the nature of the language. It doesn't have words in the way we think of them. You construct "words" on the fly, since a word is kind of this language's equivalent of a sentence/paragraph.
Funnily enough, ALL of this was made by a single guy. FOUR times.
it's kind of the opposite. There are fewer than 1000 (of the 3600 potential) roots assigned meaning right now. To construct any communication possible within the language, you only need to have those 1000 roots and the tables of phoneme afixes. You wouldn't bother making a dictionary definition for every potential combination of the 1000 roots + phoneme afixes, you'd only make a dictionary entry for every root + every phoneme afix, and you users can unify the set of definitions themselves
Knowing the IPA, seeing someone trying to figure it out ,not knowing there's a wiki for it , hurts me on an emotional level
4:00 "Mondaic" like 'mosaic" or did you mean "Monadic?" It's ok to say it, almost every male in every species only has one.
"Conlangs", or constructed languages, are a fascinating thing because there have been so many such languages created over time, by many different people. Yet (almost) none have ever actually gained acceptance as a universal L2 language, much less to become a living language.
Constructed languages combine two basic human desires: to communicate with another human, and to engineer something for efficiency - and yet apparently these two desires are at some deep level, fundamentally incompatible!
I highly recommend reading "In The Land of Invented Languages" by Arika Okrent for a history / survey / one person's foray into that world. Which includes exploring the extremely small number of people who have been raised with a constructed language from childhood as a "native" language - the two most commonly learned conlangs, Esperanto and yes, Klingon.
This is like that meme of find all the meaning behind why the author used “the” in this spot, except there’s actually a full paragraph of meaning behind it and it’s actually spelled 七んę
lol
Nanane?
@@imveryangryitsnotbutter or shichinę?
@@foxpurrincess3209 It could also be qiwuę
shichieę
Imagine this as an adopted language.
"How're you doing with this essay? I've only 1,700 words so far."
"Wrote mine in Ithkuil - finished in five."
Five words, but it took a week.
Considering two word means "on the contrary i think this rugged road gonna turn down at some point" maybe its faster to create it than write it
@@10klikeanonimbalikwxc14 and one word was the bibliography
Once politicians learn it maybe they can fit the things they try to pass through the legislative process on a few printed pages instead of a large bundle of paper that could probably be used to knock someone out. Oh and as a bonus many people won't be able to read it, so somewhat learning the language might get you into a media job to translate it into normal people words.
@@extrastuff9463 sooooo business as usuall. but a Bottom Line Up Front version of stuff.
this language feels like what runic in light novels would be; extremely compact with lots of meaning but incredibly complex as well
At least there would be no more ambiguous prophecies.
1:44 Sam casually mispronouncing the English "sh" sound preceded by "k"
"It's pronounced like the sh in shoeshine but without rounding your lips"
"Wow that tells me nothing"
It means the "SH" sound as in SHip. Notice the SH sounds different if you pronounce just the first part of each word, Shoe (rounded lips) or Ship (corners of the mouth pulled back).
So ... it's exhaling?
@@DugrozReports Sh as in ship.
@@OldDemonTooth Sh doesn't use your lips, so they both sound the same.
Sh-eh-shine
Tolkien would have had a field day with this
Tolkien would assume Satan is trying to tempt his soul with this xD
Fascinating subject, but hearing "phenome" so many times just killed my enthusiasm for it. It's as if he willed the concept of "phenome" into existence, and it was a combination of "phoneme" and "pheromone" that resulted in "a mispronunciation that produces an emotional or instinctive effect upon the listener separate from the actual vocalized statement".
Phenome-nal
the information is so dense it might collapse into a black hole any second
This actually makes me feel good about my misguided decision to learn chinese and russian, so thanks Ithkul
The fact that one of the sounds is described as being pronounced "like the 'h' in 'sh-'" just makes me so angry. This is a language made by a madman for talking computers.
Why does that make you angry?
@@noe2521 because the h in sh is silent...
@@horntx Yes and no. You can kind of seperate the 'h' part of 'sh' because it is distinct from 's', but 'sh' tends to be considered as a single consonant in a lot of languages.
@@fyeahusa exactly
@@fyeahusa , exactly, like in my language, sh is a letter/consonant itself (there is actually 2-3 sh, one deeper, one lighter, and another one is, well it sometimes acts as a normal s, and sometimes as a light sh).
(Bengali).
While infinitely more complex, this kind of resembles how Semitic languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew are constructed.
Albeit less mind bending, these languages also feature roots, that with the help of a series of templates, pre- and suffixes can compress simple sentences into a single word.
The root H.B.B / H.V.V for example constructs nouns and verbs that revolve around the general theme of love and affection (both in Hebrew and in Arabic).
I can now apply a template that molds this root into a verb in first person, simple past tense: Hibavti in Hebrew, or Habet in most Arabic dialects, which means I (male) liked \ I loved respectively. Now I can add a suffix that implies an object: Hibavtia in Hebrew, Habetha in Arabic which means "I loved her" in one simple word.
It's like the roots of Semitic languages with the morphology of something like Nahuatl.
To steal an example from somone else:
"Nehualmoyecastemojmolunijtzinutinemisquiöni"
Which means:
"You, honorable people, might have come along banging your noses as to make them bleed, but you did in fact not."
All built around the root "moluni", meaning bloom/boil/bleed.
Honestly, if Ithkuil was less strict and less artficially economic and systemic with it's sound vocabulary it could have passed as a natural language, just one extreamly "alien" to people who are only indo-european speakers.
God, Hebrew is like a language from outer space to me and I'm already completely failing to learn that one. I used to think I'm good at languages but as I spent my youth learning European languages that have a lot of similarities I had no idea that my brain can't adapt to a Non-European language AT ALL.
@@c.w.8200 Hebrew really isn't difficult. This kind of speech isn't particularly used all of the time. It's used a lot in religious texts and news articles but from what I understand, it is a formal way of talking that isn't really used conversationally very often. Hebrew is a language that tries to go out of it's way to make it easier on the speaker. Reading it is actually very simple and the root system is pretty logical. I'm a native English speaker and I haven't found Hebrew difficult at all.
@@c.w.8200 Reading this as a native hebrew speaker is so funny
Bro, there was so much wild information in this my brain went smooth
"the most specific language"
"...that experienced *something* "
I see a slight contradiction with those two statements
learning this language sounds really interesting but I can still barely manage to speak the one language I do know. guess that's off the table for now
its creator cant even speak it
Interesting?
You forgot to capitalize Guess
@@aaroncohen2700 uh do u rlly think he was trying to sound professional? Plz dont be a language nerd...we all know but its just to be quick. Or did i miss a joke
5:36 I am eastern European, I use these special symbols above letters, I would pronounce it as "uok-sh-urn".
You must be Slovak.
If we could one day instantly transfer any language in our brain, this language would genuinely be the best ever. As you have a vast knowledge of concepts and an insane precision accessible to you, it would be just perfect to describe simply pretty much anything without having the disadvantage of learning the language.
If you could insurgent transfer language to your brain, you'd want a much more exact language than this. Binary would probably be best. Everything is either true or false.
@@chrismanuel9768 what if you were trying to describe a more abstract idea that didn't have a simple true or false description
@@chrismanuel9768 organic brains do not operate on computer logic, nor do natural languages. The amount of overhead that you would have to generate to describe any kind of abstract idea that lacks an objective truth value would makes such a language functionally useless unless you had a brain computer interface acting as the interpreter while your brain was given the output to process. Precision means nothing if the usability factor is next to non-existent.
@@Thuazabi "precisions means nothing if the usability factor is next to non-existent"
Like trying to use a bolt-action sniper rifle in a close-range sub-machine gun / pistol fight.
Sometimes you just gotta do what works and works RIGHT NOW even if it's not perfect.
Mother nature has her own raw efficiency.
I don't think the human brain could even keep up with 'words' that mean as much as entire pages during a conversation... This isn't meant for regular speaking anyway, since languages will always prefer simplicity and comprehension.
It'd be much better to learn something like Esperanto, a beautiful, exact language that was also artificially made.
This is a "Damn I wish I was smart enough to learn this" moment.
~1:58 it literally compares the sound to the sh's in "shoeshine" right there, you don't need to know what all of the terms mean to get an idea of how you're supposed to say it
Such an amazing find this language. Thank you for the intro!
"Phenomes"? How about phonemes? Sorry Sam, but I teach English for a profession, so you'll indulge me, I'm sure.
He also got "monadic" wrong.
Since each phoneme in Ithkuil contains about as much information as the human genome, I think phenome is an excellent word to use here
@@SabertoothSeal lol
It was painful hearing "phenomes" so many times in this video. Can't wait to hear this in the corrections video.
Same. I teach remedial reading, and I talk about phonemes and graphemes almost constant.