There are so many ways for speakers of English to see the world. We can glimpse, glance, visualize, view, look, spy, or ogle. Stare, gawk, or gape. Peek, watch, or scrutinize. Each word suggests some subtly different quality: looking implies volition; spying suggests furtiveness; gawking carries an element of social judgment and a sense of surprise. When we try to describe an act of vision, we consider a constellation of available meanings. But if thoughts and words exist on different planes, then expression must always be an act of compromise.
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. Read more.
See: The New Yorker
Comments about this article
China
Local time: 11:47
Chinese to English
I just wanted to comment to drag this up onto the forum, because it is a beautiful, beautiful essay.
It's a musing on human geekery that also includes this sentence:
'“Do you realize who this guy is?” he whispered to me. “This guy is, like, the No. 2 terrorist in Ukraine.”'
It also brings in George Lakoff, whose work I love, and I think is fundamental for translators. Please, read and enjoy! And thanks, Romina, for bringing it to our attention.
United States
Local time: 23:47
Member
Spanish to English
+ ...
This was really interesting on so many levels. Thanks for posting, Romina.
France
Local time: 05:47
French to English
+ ...
Thanks: another good excuse for not getting on with the chores in hand!
Spain
Local time: 05:47
Spanish to English
+ ...
Loved the definition of Pskeoj (had a vocabulary that was pounded out randomly on a typewriter) which reminds me of some of my own ramblings.
To report site rules violations or get help, contact a site moderator:
You can also contact site staff by submitting a support request »
This discussion can also be accessed via the ProZ.com forum pages.