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An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

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Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

#51

Post by smsm42 »

MichaelDickens wrote: post #2

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 magnitud…

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.

Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

#52

Post by smsm42 »

scythe wrote: post #44
ketralnis wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that explains anything; it looks like a list of aesthetic "faults" that the author finds, unlikely to be recognised by anyone without a degree in linguistics. Surely those faults exist, but it's a stretch to pretend that they alone explain anything. I speak some Esperanto but I'm no zealot. The "explanation" that your neighbours don't speak Esperanto, if such a simplified thing can exist, is probably as…

After reading it, I would say it is really written badly, but the author's point seems to be that most of Esperanto's structure was basically designed at random, with no particular goals in mind, other than looking superficially similar to other European languages. His substantive objections are as follows: * the language has an excessive number of phonemes me: On this point I disagree strongly. A language with more…

>>> A language with more phonemes can form shorter words and convey information faster.

Shorter words, yes. Convey information faster - only if you have perfect speakers and perfect listeners. Otherwise, in the best case you'd just have people ask - did you just say "hélló" or "hëllò"? In the worse case, they'd just misunderstand what you're saying. And since you strive to eliminate redundancy, instead of nonsense which would trigger request for repetition, you'd get meaning - but meaning something else that you didn't intend to say.

Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

#54

Post by scythe »

smsm42 wrote: post #52
scythe wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After reading it, I would say it is really written badly, but the author's point seems to be that most of Esperanto's structure was basically designed at random, with no particular goals in mind, other than looking superficially similar to other European languages. His substantive objections are as follows: * the language has an excessive number of phonemes me: On this point I disagree strongly. A language with more…

>>> A language with more phonemes can form shorter words and convey information faster. Shorter words, yes. Convey information faster - only if you have perfect speakers and perfect listeners. Otherwise, in the best case you'd just have people ask - did you just say "hélló" or "hëllò"? In the worse case, they'd just misunderstand what you're saying. And since you strive to eliminate redundancy, instead of nonsense wh…

>Shorter words, yes. Convey information faster - only if you have perfect speakers and perfect listeners. Otherwise, in the best case you'd just have people ask - did you just say "hélló" or "hëllò"? In the worse case, they'd just misunderstand what you're saying. And since you strive to eliminate redundancy, instead of nonsense which would trigger request for repetition, you'd get meaning - but meaning something else that you didn't intend to say.

Perhaps I didn't include enough context from the document. He cited Esperanto as containing 34 phonemes, compared to English at 43, and then a list including Andean Spanish with 17, Japanese with 14, Hawai'ian with 8, or Rotokas with 6. That is, he cited (what seem to be) outliers with the smallest number of phonemes and implied that these were desirable. Later he notes that Eastern Polish has 49 phonemes.

I agree that a language can certainly have phonemes which are difficult to distinguish (Mandarin Chinese is famous for this) or hard to pronouce (the voiced "th" in English "the" is famous for this) or inscrutable for some listeners (most English speakers cannot distinguish dz from d), but I thought his minimalism was too extreme.

Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

#55

Post by RVuRnvbM2e »

smsm42 wrote: post #51
MichaelDickens wrote: post #2

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 magnitud…

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 l…

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.

Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

#56

Post by moconnor »

yongjik wrote: post #39

That was an interesting read, but the reporter's breathless assertions frequently got in the way of appreciating Quijada and his idea. I mean, things like: > A sentence like “On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point” becomes simply “Tram-mļöi hhâsmařpţuktôx.” Simply? We could have used LZW algorithm and the sentence could probably become even shorter, just a "s…

The English text is 97 ASCII encoded bytes.

Compressed with zlib: 86 bytes.

Compressed with lzma: 98 bytes.

The Ithkuil representation is just 30 UTF-8 encoded bytes.

Compressed with zlib: 39 bytes.

Compressed with lzma: 47 bytes.

(Measured using python's zlib/pylmza modules to avoid e.g. file header overhead)

It's hard to achieve this kind of compression without an external dictionary. What Quijada has created with Ithkuil is, in part, a dictionary for the space of human thought and concepts, something I wouldn't have expected to work in the way the article describes it.

Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

#57

Post by laichzeit0 »

smsm42 wrote: post #51
MichaelDickens wrote: post #2

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 magnitud…

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 l…

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)."

Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

#58

Post by notahacker »

godarderik wrote: post #20
Terr_ wrote: post #16

I think there's some research out there that suggests all natural languages have about the same information density, when you factor how two people in conversation will add error-correction or extra context to frame an idea. IMO this suggests the bottleneck is something about our brains on a biological rather than linguistic level.

According to a study published several years ago, mainstream languages seem to operate on an information density/speed tradeoff [1].The authors found that languages that are spoken faster seem to encode less information per syllable than those uttered at a slower pace. This does seem to suggest that biology may be the limiting role in controlling the rate at which humans convey information. Indeed, the language menti…

The article seems to support the information density / speed tradeoff, in hinting several times that the language's inventor puts at least as much cognitive effort into agglutinating syllables to form a word in his language as he would into joining words to make a sentence in a second language.

Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

#59

Post by ZoFreX »

Steko wrote: post #50
MichaelDickens wrote: post #2

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 magnitud…

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.

> 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.

Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

#60

Post by lloeki »

ejr wrote: post #53

If anyone wants to hear what Ithkuil sounds like : https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Ithkuil_... From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil

> Ithkuil does not use the concept of zero

Interesting. How is one supposed to talk about math without a concept of zero?

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