Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Bubble Burst

As I busily try to catch up with the Conlangery Podcast, I blew through episode three without thinking as carefully about them as I should have.  A day or two later it me, "I'm trying to do exactly what that featured conlang did.  I better go read."  The language in question is Ithkuil.  Let me break it down for you:

It's a conlang.  That means its not a naturally occurring language.  If that emotionally bothers you, grow up.  Most conlangers (someone who invents languages) don't believe in God, so they take the symbol of the Tower of Babel tongue-in-cheek.  I do, however.  The Bible tells us the end of the story, that we will understand every tribe, tongue and language.  We will all be linguists naturally in heaven!

It's an a priori language.  That means it's not even supposed to seem like it is related to any other language.  Frankly, unless you're very creative in your mixing-and-matching, this seems like the only way to go.  Why would you invent another Indo-European language?  Now to be honest, I would be interested to see a Sino-Romance language, but you would have got A LOT of research ahead of you before you could even conceive of a project like that.

It is a philosophical language.  That means it has a particular mindset or paradigm it's trying to achieve.    The Whorfian idea behind Ithkuil is that language limits how you think, so the language should avail you of every opportunity at every moment, so you're never limited by the language, only yourself.  Ithkuil has maximum variety at every turn.  I should have seen the parallels between this and my ideas right away.

The nature of my hypothetical creation didn't hit me until I starting thinking about creating a lexicon.  In my hypothetical "Trinitarian" language, every 'thing' to be lex'ed would have to be weighed and considered under this rubric: "What thing is it's dialectical opposite and what 'glue' unites those two?"  These three components correspond to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  One is the unbegotten, unsent God, the other is the begotten, sent, subordinating Man and the third is Love, the connective tissue that binds them together and spans the chasm between the Two.

The trouble came when I considered "The cat sat on the mat."  How would I say this in Trinitarian?  Cat's could be the antithesis of dogs, untrainable, not-really-domesticated animals.  Sitting might be the polar opposite of running.  Mats are for getting dirt of one's shoes, so their antinomy would be dirty shoes.  But what about "The wallaby lounged on the ottoman"?  How would I make a Trinitarian sentence for that?  Or "Steve played chess with Sally"?  Philosophically, I had let the One conquer the Many.

Aside from the fact that John Quijada used a "binity" instead of a "trinity" system of thought, Ithkuil had already thought of everything I could think of and much, much more.  If you haven't attempted his grammer yet, it's well worth your time.  You won't make it through it all, but just to see how much thought he's put into his categories is awesome.  I saw (by the tenth page) that this is not what I wanted to do.   I wanted a language sinful, fallen, post-Babel people (like me) could speak.  I decided to just aim for "the opposite of English" and then let "Trinitarian" be the meeting of the two.

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