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

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

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

This is attracting some reader interest here, so I should probably mention, for other Hacker News participants deeply interested in human languages, a definitive analysis of Esperanto[1] explaining why Esperanto has not caught on with more speakers.

[1] http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/

Two things struck me about this article in hindsight when I read it.

-- Whose pot did the Croats, Bosnians and Slovenes piss in to not make it into this super Slavic union?

-- China Mieville wrote a book[0] along very similar thought lines which won the Locus Award.

Also, Garkavenko appears not to have taken the obvious side [1] in Ukraine's present conflict given how he is described in Foer's article

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embassytown

[1] http://maidantranslations.com/2014/06/24/russian-volunteers-...

Try http://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs for discussion and lists of languages. There are many subreddits for specific languages. For example, Toki Pona [1] and Lojban [2].

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/tokipona [2] http://www.reddit.com/r/lojban

Ithkuil has well over double the number of phonemes as Marain, so the answer would probably be "not so well".