logical language - Developers

Ithkuil: A Philosophical Design for a Hypothetical Language
Home Introduction 4 Case Morphology 8 Adjuncts
FAQs 1 Phonology 5 Verb Morphology 9 Syntax
Links of
Interest
Updates /
News
2 Morpho-
Phonology
3 Basic
Morphology
6 More Verb
Morphology
7 Suffixes
Introduction
10 Lexico-
Semantics
11 The Writing
System
12 The Number
System
List of
Abbreviations
The Lexicon
These webpages present the grammar of an artificially constructed human language, Ithkuil. It has
been designed with the following goals in mind:
1. The findings of cognitive science and cognitive linguistics since the 1980s show that human
cognition gives rise to and processes far more information than is overtly expressed by natural
human languages. Theoretically, it should be possible to design a human-usable language that
overtly expresses more (or “deeper”) levels/aspects of human cognition than are found in natural
human languages.
2. Natural human languages are notorious for their semantic ambiguity, polysemy (multiple meanings
for a given word), semantic vagueness, inexactitude, illogic, redundancy, and overall arbitrariness.
Theoretically, it should be possible to design the language to minimize these various characteristics
in favor of greater semantic precision, exactitude, and specification of a speaker’s cognitive intent.
3. The above two goals would seemingly demand that the resulting language be long-winded, since
individual words of the language (or at least any sentence as a whole) would have to convey much
more morpho-semantic content than their natural language counterparts. Nevertheless, it should
theoretically be possible to accomplish the above two goals while achieving relatively concise
morpho-phonological forms for words. In other words, to be able to pack a lot of meaning and
information into a relatively small number of syllables.
Ithkuil represents the culmination of my attempts over a period of thirty years or so to achieve the
above goals. It should be noted that Ithkuil is NOT intended to function like a “natural” human
language. Ithkuil exists as an exercise in exploring how human languages could function, not how
human languages do function.
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