December 18, 2012
An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented
Joshua Foer in The New Yorker:
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.
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 09:25 AM | Permalink
Comments
Great catch.
Even microbes have their own language with individual words.
There was an earlier language that did not fare as well as the language that John Quijada presented.
Posted by: Dredd | Dec 18, 2012 10:43:58 AM
Just as a curiosity, in the beginning of his famous masterpiece, Cervantes gives as surnames to don Quijote, the patronymics of 'Quijada' or 'Quesada'.
Posted by: Félix E. F. Larocca, MD | Dec 18, 2012 3:18:45 PM
Thank you, this was really one of the most amazing things I have ever read!
Posted by: uncleMonty | Dec 18, 2012 4:55:16 PM
I'm going to have to get a hold of his book. Even if one completely ignores the content of his new vocabulary, all of the categories, declensions, forms, persons, etc. that he rigorously outlines should be a great resource for a better understanding of one's own language whatever it is.
Posted by: DAS | Dec 18, 2012 11:57:30 PM
My co-blogger Dean C. Rowan has told me about John Quijada from time to time. They were high school buddies. Here is what Dean wrote when he sent me the New Yorker link:
"Folks, a buddy of mine is featured in a lengthy piece in the latest New Yorker. Had this piece arrived before the demise of AB, I would have posted on it. I went to elementary and high school with John and his twin Paul. Our mode of juvenile and adolescent play usually involved a good deal of fake language. We used to pepper the high school campus with banners and signs in a non-existent foreign language. John never grew up in that regard."
Posted by: Ruchira | Dec 19, 2012 3:04:41 AM
A folly to celebrate, I imagine such a language would bring no end of benefit to the operations of the motor vehicle department. But to frame a faceted lyric suitable to serve as the root of social law, we need more refractory material. The beauty and properness of 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion' is precisely the dimensionality it allows, and therefore the freedom within some bounds, to the wise to whom we entrust its interpretation and the endless argument it engenders. Whose truth and therefore legitimacy each proponent can embrace. Not all ambiguity is inefficiency; in concision we may well express imperatives, but the long form is proper for the warming babble that precedes commitment, and the flexible ties that bind the free in relation, between solitude and servitude.
Posted by: jb | Dec 19, 2012 7:35:06 AM
Really fascinating. But isn't the thing about language that it lives and evolves, and not that it's perfect? Practice has to be ahead of theory, as it always is. And, isn't there already another symbolic language -- math -- that excels at precision, efficiency and economy? Our own utterances are, and should be, yeastier than that.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Dec 19, 2012 10:55:58 AM
" Our own utterances are, and should be, yeastier than that." - Elatia
Exactly!
Posted by: Ruchira | Dec 19, 2012 11:50:28 AM
> A folly to celebrate, I imagine
> such a language would bring no
> end of benefit to the operations of
> the motor vehicle department.
We Californians are sometimes foolish, but this is not folly by any means. Quite the opposite, in fact. This is good, interesting, aesthetically pleasing, solid work. Nice work, Mr. Quijada!
Posted by: Anand Manikutty | Dec 19, 2012 12:03:16 PM
But, Elatia, mathematics has no word for cat (or for that matter, for anything else). As Russell supposedly said, "Mathematics is the field where we don't know what we are talking about, nor whether or not what we say is true." :-)
Posted by: S. Abbas Raza | Dec 19, 2012 2:47:59 PM
Good one, Abbas! But if you take it on its own non-feline terms, it's perfect. And what Russell said of math is more true, still, of other languages.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Dec 19, 2012 5:36:20 PM
I could have been more clear myself; not that it would be folly to celebrate this achievement, but that the work is a folly, in the Victorian sense, and one worth celebrating. Great stuff.
Posted by: jb | Dec 19, 2012 5:55:44 PM
Amazing. If I could venture a metaphor, it suggests Justin E.H. Smith on acid.
Posted by: Zara | Dec 20, 2012 2:45:30 AM
I'm happy to see these comments here, and all the more proud of John for...what?...forging ahead against all odds?...bothering at all?
Must agree with jb that not all ambiguity is inefficiency, but I think John's goal was not so pinched. He understands the force of good literature, despite the breadth of his collection of science fiction. I note, for example, that John's concerns for precision and concision do not include the complementary accuracy, probably a lost cause for language.
Funny, I usually trot out the First Amendment freedom of speech clause as an example of the FF's virulent passive-aggressiveness. Nothing beautiful about it.
Posted by: Dean C. Rowan | Dec 20, 2012 11:45:54 AM
Zara, this DOES seems like Justin totally disinhibited...
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Dec 20, 2012 2:30:49 PM
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