logical language - Developers

The reader may well wonder why it takes a 19-word sentence in English to translate a two-word Ithkuil
sentence. One might assume the sentence “cheats” in that the two Ithkuil words simply have innately
intricate and specialized meanings. While it is true that the first word, tram-mļöi, translates as ‘on the
contrary, it may turn out at some point (that...),’ and the second word, hhâsmařpţuktôx, means ‘I
have a feeling this unevenly high range of mountains trails off,’ it would be quite erroneous to
conclude that these are simply autonomous words one might theoretically find in an Ithkuil dictionary.
Indeed, the only part of the sentence that represents any sort of “root” word is -âsm-, a stem more or
less meaning ‘hill’ or ‘upland.’ The remainder of the sentence is made up entirely of morphological, not
lexical components, i.e., prefixes, suffixes, infixes, vowel permutations, shifts in stress and tone, etc.
For example, the first word, tram-mļöi, has three parts to it as shown below:
1. tr(a)- = an affix indicating a rebuttal to an allegation, translatable as ‘on the
contrary...’
2. m-mļ- = an infix which conveys both aspectual information translatable as ‘it turns out
(to be) that’ or ‘it is revealed that,’ plus subjunctive mood, translatable as
‘(it) may (be that)...’
3. -öi = an aspectual suffix translatable as ‘at some point’ or ‘somewhere along the
way’
The second word, hhâsmařpţuktôx, breaks down morphologically as follows:
1. hh- = an affix indicating a conclusion based on the speaker’s intuition, translatable
as ‘I have a feeling (that)...’
2. - = a stem meaning ‘hill, upland,’ in turn derived from the root -sm- indicating
âsm(a)- the level of a landscape
3. -řpţ- = an affix indicating (1) that the stem is to be re-interpreted as comprising a
composite entity of non-identical members consolidated together into a single
segmented whole (i.e., ‘hill’ becomes ‘uneven range of hills’), and (2) that
the entity displays depletion (i.e., ‘trailing off’ or ‘petering out’)
4. -ukt- = a demonstrative suffix translatable as ‘this’ (= ‘the one in question’ or ‘the
one at hand’)