John Quijada, Ithkuil, and Clarity in Language

At The New Yorker an article by Joshua Foer describes the development of Ithkuil, a language invented by John Quijada that is highly concise while seeking to be precise, explicit, and logical. In doing so Foer's article tells some of the interesting story of Quijada's "outsider" life while describing the invented language community (which is extensive and in which I have an interest), the limitations of "natural" languages, and historical efforts to overcome them. To let the article speak for itself:

Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like “knight.” No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today.

“Natural languages are adequate, but that doesn’t mean they’re optimal,” John Quijada, a fifty-four-year-old former employee of the California State Department of Motor Vehicles, told me. In 2004, he published a monograph on the Internet that was titled “Ithkuil: A Philosophical Design for a Hypothetical Language.” Written like a linguistics textbook, the fourteen-page Web site ran to almost a hundred and sixty thousand words. It documented the grammar, syntax, and lexicon of a language that Quijada had spent three decades inventing in his spare time. Ithkuil had never been spoken by anyone other than Quijada, and he assumed that it never would be.

The article also tells -- this is something of a spoiler -- how Ithkuil has been expropriated by a Ukranian/Russian ultranationalist, anti-Semitic group that evidently wants to use it as part of its creation of a "super" Serb/Russo society populated by its version of "supermen."

That will never happen because Ithkuil is evidently too complex for easy speech and does not prevent ambiguity -- both of these points are borne out by the examples of Ithkuil in the article though they were not offered there for that purpose. Yet, even if those were not the case, languages that are spoken widely evolve in use, and Ithkuil's lack of ambiguity and concision would erode. This is because, as language after language around the world bears out, people like to speak in shortcuts and those shortcuts add ambiguity. Nor is there one certain way to describe objects or actions in Ithkuil inevitably leading to misunderstandings and misuses.

This is not to say, however, that Ithkuil or other invented languages may not have multiple specific uses. There are, in fact many invented languages (computer languages for one example) that have very important though not universal uses. Likewise, within the confines of an existing language, specialized lexicons, grammars, and semantics develop -- indeed, that is the primary mechanism by which all languages evolve. While the attempt to impose one manner of speaking on a large population is inane (and Quijada does not propose that), development of specialized languages for specialized tasks is very beneficial. None of that is good news for the OCD sufferers among us who are frustrated by the multiplicity of languages and would pare them away (and there is merit to there desire to the extent it deprives many people of appreciating a writing in its original form).

Quijada, in fact, first viewed Ithkuil as a work of art. That it evidently is. While I lack the wherewithal to assess how well it succeeds, the fact that is so well appreciated by those who do speaks volumes for it. That Quijada's private efforts are so successful against such long odds makes him sort of a hero for me.