Brithenig is an answer to the question of what English might have sounded like as a Romance language, if vulgar Latin had taken root on the British Isles.Ow. Not quite.
“For me, as a linguist looking at this, I have to say, ‘O.K., this isn’t going to be used.’ It has an assumption of efficiency that really isn’t efficient, given how the brain works. It misses the metaphor stuff. But the parts that are successful are really nontrivial. This may be an impossible language,” he said.I suspect we arrive at an understanding of what it is we're thinking by a series of approximations based on a kind of metaphoric, experiential symbology. Our spoken words fall out of that process. It seems like in order to speak Ithkuil you will always be translating from an internal process into it; that you're not really ever going to be thinking in it. But it would be amazing (if possibly unethical) to raise children in it and see how true that turns out to be.
Wouldn't it be more efficient to spell "Ithkuil" with a single character that represents the 'th' sound, rather than the 't' and the 'h' which already represent other sounds? Unless it's pronounced something like [ithkuil], which is rather inefficient to pronounce due to the articulatory gestures required to make that happen.Ithkuil has its own script, so I'm guessing that this is just transcription. But given that, even the transcription has some fairly exotic letters.
I wanted to use Ithkuil to show how you would discuss philosophy and emotional states transparently. It’s the ideal language for political and philosophical debate—any forum where people hide their intent or obfuscate behind language. Ithkuil makes you say what you mean and mean what you say.
“At the conference, there was one person . . . with an interpreter,” he wrote on his blog. “To put it simply: he had Pentagon written all over him. I don’t know, it was plain and simple, a stereotypical caricature of the face of a government agent. . . . When he took the initiative and asked a question, it was always exactly the thing that a government agent would bluntly ask about.”Pynchon/Calvino in real life. I love it. And yes, this should totally be a film. Philip Seymour Hoffman as indisposed "Why did you come to me?" Lakoff, Paul Dano as the quiet-evil Slavic Nazi, I can see it.
Garkavenko had also noticed the moment when my translator and I realized who he was. “He changed right before our eyes. . . . It became clear that he had met me on the Internet. Afterward, I found out whom fate had brought. Joshua Foer . . . the well-known journalist . . . a descendant of Odessa Jews who had once fled to the West, at an inopportune time for them. Of course, they were confident in their intuitions. And how could they over there ignore a phenomenon like Oleg Bakhtiyarov’s project?”
"For me, as a linguist looking at this, I have to say, ‘O.K., this isn’t going to be used.’ It has an assumption of efficiency that really isn’t efficient, given how the brain works. It misses the metaphor stuff. But the parts that are successful are really nontrivial. This may be an impossible language, but if you think of it as a conceptual-art project I think it’s fascinating."And to agree with George Lakoff to such a degree...well, I it find irritating in a way I can't quite describe. Other than something akin to being stuck between a rock and a hard place. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
"Quijada, who had been wearing a pair of Coke-bottle glasses and toting a cane to compensate for a leg injury, sized up her metallic silver boots and figure-hugging bluejeans and seemed taken aback. “What is a beautiful woman like you doing teaching Ithkuil?” he asked."I would just LOVE to see the English translation of this question in Ithkuil.
"Bakhtiyarov explained. “This is the same goal as Ithkuil. Human beings have a linguistic essence, but we are in a transitional stage to some other essence. We can defeat and conquer language.” He sees Ithkuil as a tool to bring all of one’s unconscious thoughts and feelings under conscious control."If this were to happen, I think I would cease to be an efficiently functioning human on many levels.
If people have to navigate unnatural hurdles with their tongues when speaking, then something will get lost...either speakers will simplify the sound system (through basic, natural principles of sound change, such as assimilation, deletion, epenthesis, etc.), which introduces variability."Is that an accent, or do you usually frame every sentence in the subjunctive?"
Before the war, there was a great international Esperanto convention in Geneva. Esperanto scholars came from all over the world to give papers about and to praise the idea of an international language. Every country on earth was represented at the convention, and all the papers were given in Esperanto.
After the long meeting was finally concluded, the great scholars wandered amiably along the corridors, and at last they felt free to talk casually among themselves in their international language: "Nu, vos macht a yid?"*
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posted by thelonius at 11:27 AM on December 17, 2012