"As our vehicle leaves the ground and plunges over the edge of the cliff toward the valley floor, I ponder whether it is possible that one might allege I am guilty of an act of moral failure, having failed to maintain a proper course along the roadway.”
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... uiqisx.ogg)
Crazy challenge? I am willing to up the ante. One word, a lifetime of pain and struggle:
Ithkuil. If that word does not strike fear in you already, then read on and consider signing up for a crazy challenge so fraught with peril that, to paraphrase a line from Apocalypse Now, “…
if you’ll [learn this language],
you will never have to prove your courage in any other way.”
Ithkuil is a conlang whose stunning breadth of significance is matched only by the profundity of its challenging nature (although currently in the process of revision, the classical 2004 version has 65 consonants, 17 vowels and 96 grammatical cases), with such a measure of difficulty in learning that no human is yet fluent in it (or even in its simpler country-cousin, Ilaksh).
Also, a wicked cool writing system – truly a collection of
weird squiggles, or perhaps more helpfully described as “
kinda like an abugida, but also kinda like logography” (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_n3loSfejg) or perhaps more casually described as “
looks like Klingon, except way more obtuse."
Ithkuil represents “
the creation of what human beings, left to their own devices, would never create naturally, but rather only by conscious effort — an idealized language whose aim is the highest possible degree of logic, efficiency, detail, and accuracy in cognitive expression via spoken human language, while minimizing the ambiguity, vagueness, illogic, redundancy, polysemy (multiple meanings) and overall arbitrariness that is seemingly ubiquitous in natural human language.”
http://ithkuil.net/I appreciate there is already a small reddit Ithkuil community, but I am confident that in 15 or 20 years of intense and committed effort, the llorg community can significantly also assist in efforts to support this bizarrely-complicated language and create a community of competent speakers (though not native speakers: that will have to wait until computers completely - instead of as at present only partially - replace humans). And it is an exciting time to take up this interesting language, as Creator is in the process of releasing a new iteration.
Please consider signing up for an exciting challenge to develop a community of speakers competent in Ithkuil! To paraphrase JFK, “
We choose to [learn Ithkuil] go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”
PS. Just to be clear – I have no intention of signing up for this, as I am still struggling with Italian.
