logical language - Developers

principle of complementarity creates a semantic situation which is counterintuitive to Western semantic notions.
For example, let us analyze the root -mm- ‘NUCLEAR FAMILY MEMBER’. While most languages would consider the concept parent as
fundamentally opposite from the concept child and assign separate word-roots to each, Ithkuil recognizes that one implies the other.
No person can be a parent unless they've had a child, just as any child must have (or have had) parents. This, then, constitutes an
archetypal complementary relationship, the whole two-sided nature of which is referred to by the holistic stem -mm-. One way to
interpret the meaning, then, of -mm- is to say that the word means both ‘parent’ and ‘child,’ which of course strikes one as being
problematical, perhaps even nonsensical. But in fact, the word does not mean either ‘parent’ or ‘child,’ but rather a person who is one
of the members of a parent-child relationship, i.e., a member of a nuclear family. With such a root, Stem 2 and Stem 3 in turn
subdivide Stem 1 into the further complementary derivatives of male and female. Such “bi-level” derivations of complementary
concepts using Stem 2 and Stem 3 are common in Ithkuil root/stem derivation. Here then are the actual meanings of the stems for -
mm-.
Holistic Stem 1st Complementary Stem 2nd Complementary Stem
Stem 1 amm- nuclear family member omm-: parent âmm-: child (offspring)
Stem 2 emm-: male nuclear family member ömm-: father êmm-: son
Stem 3 umm-: female nuclear family member ûmm-: mother ômm-: daughter
Additional conceptual complementary pairs which would be contained within single Ithkuil lexical roots are illustrated by the following
examples:
Holistic Concept Complementary Concepts
eating food ingestion
think, act of thinking a thought (thing considered) process of consideration
liquid fluid (= ontological nature) wet[ness] (=defining attribute)
measuring a measurement process of measuring
transference of possession giving taking
traversal between points coming, arrival going, departure
commercial transaction buying selling
2.4 PARTS OF SPEECH
Ithkuil has only two parts of speech: formatives and adjuncts. While there are words which function as nouns and verbs, such nouns
and verbs derive morphologically from the same grammatical stem (its nominal or verbal function or meaning being dependent on the
particular morpho-semantic context), hence the term formative. This process of noun/verb derivation from formatives is discussed in
detail in Section 2.4.1 below. Note that there are no adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, pronouns, determiners, conjunctions, particles or
interjections in Ithkuil, at least not at any autonomous lexical level that can be termed a part of speech. The equivalents to, or
substitutes for, these latter Western grammatical notions all exist within the formative-adjunct morphological paradigm.
Another dissimilarity with Western languages is that there are no irregular or defective forms; all formatives and adjuncts follow the
same inflectional and derivational rules without exception and all formatives are theoretically capable of semantic denotation for every
inflectional or derivational category, i.e., all inflectionally or derivationally possible words theoretically exist and have meaning