No. An inability to make be vague doesn’t help with being clear.
In English I can say: “Dear readers,” without specifying gender. In German I have to say: “Liebe Leserinnen und Leser,”. German forces me to order those words. I have to say one of the two genders first.
“Liebe Leserinnen und Leser,” doesn’t have exactly the same meaning as “Liebe Leser und Leserinnen,”
The fact that the German language forces me to specify whether I put more weight on my male or female audience is just distracting. It doesn’t help me express more of what I want to say.
Another problem of “Liebe Leserinnen und Leser,” is that intersex people in the audience aren’t included and therefore people who highly value political correctness might object to the phrase and use a phrase that signals more political correctness.
Having to think about gender when I don’t want to think about gender costs cognitive capacity. The unspecific “Dear readers,” is much easier to use and therefore better. Ithkuil forces cognitive capacity to be used to be explicit about certain distinctions.
Take a sentence like: “The father of my mother feels (passively) that that my left ringfinger touches him 2 centimeters in inferior direction from his right earlobe” (At the present he lies on his back, so inferior is not the direction towards the center of the earth).
How would you say that in ithkuil? I think you will run into trouble because the sentence makes a lot of distinctions that ithkuil isn’t well equipped to handle while at the same time ithkuil forces you to specify all sorts of stuff that you don’t care about.
“The father of my mother feels (passively) that that my left ringfinger touches him 2 centimeters in inferior direction from his right earlobe” (At the present he lies on his back, so inferior is not the direction towards the center of the earth).
tê ömmilek audyal íčawëla tê adlaisakenniňk qe oeksrâ’as oimřalik akpʰialîk êntô’alakuňk
There you go. :) It’s a very literal translation but it’s overly redundant. A hypothetical native speaker would probably drop the “audyal” verb, deframe “íčawëla”, and rely more on Ithkuil’s extensive case system.
“Another problem of “Liebe Leserinnen und Leser,” is that intersex people in the audience aren’t included and therefore people who highly value political correctness might object to the phrase and use a phrase that signals more political correctness. ”
Thats because words can have multiple meanings, and female and male, is one of them. One of the definitions of male is have Y cromosome, and the definition of female is not have Y chromosome.
This is the definition used at this case, and is not exclude ANY human being because they would either have Y chromosomes (be this definition of male) or dont have Y chromosome (be the previously cited definition of male).
Actually those previously cited definitions of female and male, man and woman..… where the definitions used by most people at the past and are still the definition most used by people. When someone said “this is a male bathroom” they are and were saying “this bathroom is for people that have the Y chromosome, if you have it, you can enter it”, basically nowadays people are using equivocation fallacy to allow or ban people of do stuff. All the mess related to this subject can be summed at equivocation fallacy, something that would exist even if I or anyone pointing that this is a equivocation fallacy was never born.
In English I can say: “Dear readers,” without specifying gender.
“The father of my mother feels (passively) that that my left ringfinger touches him 2 centimeters in inferior direction from his right earlobe” (At the present he lies on his back, so inferior is not the direction towards the center of the earth). How would you say that in ithkuil?
I think one of us has misunderstood ithkuil (it may be me). I’ve only done a bit of looking into it, but my understanding is that it can do both of what you mentioned above. The difference is that you can’t say “dear readers” of a non-specific gender without specificying that you mean a non-specific gender. Which means you only say “dear readers of a non-specific gender” if you know that’s who you’re addressing, if you’re addressing only male readers it would be a completely different sentence. In other words, you can be general but you can’t be ambiguous. If you’re trying to get clearer in your thinking, this is a property you want.
Ithkuil also has all sorts of conujugations that get very specific with object placement and relation to one another. It’s almost ideally suited for your second sentence.
You’re all getting into some really interesting material here, and I think that it has significance beyond the scope of conlangs. I didn’t want it to get lost, or ignored by non-conlangers, here, so I started a new thread for it, called “The value of ambiguous speech”. This isn’t to say that it wouldn’t be great to see more discussion of the application of ambiguity to Ithkuil, but I didn’t want you to miss out on the wider thread if your attention was focused here.
Update: ChristianKl pointed out to me that I should put a forward link to the new discussion here (bear with me, I’m a newbie), so I’m going to try to edit one in after the fact.
Ithkuil also has all sorts of conujugations that get very specific with object placement and relation to one another. It’s almost ideally suited for your second sentence.
If the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was true, it would.
No. An inability to make be vague doesn’t help with being clear.
In English I can say: “Dear readers,” without specifying gender. In German I have to say: “Liebe Leserinnen und Leser,”. German forces me to order those words. I have to say one of the two genders first. “Liebe Leserinnen und Leser,” doesn’t have exactly the same meaning as “Liebe Leser und Leserinnen,”
The fact that the German language forces me to specify whether I put more weight on my male or female audience is just distracting. It doesn’t help me express more of what I want to say.
Another problem of “Liebe Leserinnen und Leser,” is that intersex people in the audience aren’t included and therefore people who highly value political correctness might object to the phrase and use a phrase that signals more political correctness.
Having to think about gender when I don’t want to think about gender costs cognitive capacity. The unspecific “Dear readers,” is much easier to use and therefore better. Ithkuil forces cognitive capacity to be used to be explicit about certain distinctions.
Take a sentence like: “The father of my mother feels (passively) that that my left ringfinger touches him 2 centimeters in inferior direction from his right earlobe” (At the present he lies on his back, so inferior is not the direction towards the center of the earth). How would you say that in ithkuil? I think you will run into trouble because the sentence makes a lot of distinctions that ithkuil isn’t well equipped to handle while at the same time ithkuil forces you to specify all sorts of stuff that you don’t care about.
tê ömmilek audyal íčawëla tê adlaisakenniňk qe oeksrâ’as oimřalik akpʰialîk êntô’alakuňk
There you go. :) It’s a very literal translation but it’s overly redundant. A hypothetical native speaker would probably drop the “audyal” verb, deframe “íčawëla”, and rely more on Ithkuil’s extensive case system.
Incidentally, “Dear readers” is “atpëkein”.
Thanks, I update on it’s capacity.
“Another problem of “Liebe Leserinnen und Leser,” is that intersex people in the audience aren’t included and therefore people who highly value political correctness might object to the phrase and use a phrase that signals more political correctness. ”
Thats because words can have multiple meanings, and female and male, is one of them. One of the definitions of male is have Y cromosome, and the definition of female is not have Y chromosome.
This is the definition used at this case, and is not exclude ANY human being because they would either have Y chromosomes (be this definition of male) or dont have Y chromosome (be the previously cited definition of male).
Actually those previously cited definitions of female and male, man and woman..… where the definitions used by most people at the past and are still the definition most used by people. When someone said “this is a male bathroom” they are and were saying “this bathroom is for people that have the Y chromosome, if you have it, you can enter it”, basically nowadays people are using equivocation fallacy to allow or ban people of do stuff. All the mess related to this subject can be summed at equivocation fallacy, something that would exist even if I or anyone pointing that this is a equivocation fallacy was never born.
I think one of us has misunderstood ithkuil (it may be me). I’ve only done a bit of looking into it, but my understanding is that it can do both of what you mentioned above. The difference is that you can’t say “dear readers” of a non-specific gender without specificying that you mean a non-specific gender. Which means you only say “dear readers of a non-specific gender” if you know that’s who you’re addressing, if you’re addressing only male readers it would be a completely different sentence. In other words, you can be general but you can’t be ambiguous. If you’re trying to get clearer in your thinking, this is a property you want.
Ithkuil also has all sorts of conujugations that get very specific with object placement and relation to one another. It’s almost ideally suited for your second sentence.
You’re all getting into some really interesting material here, and I think that it has significance beyond the scope of conlangs. I didn’t want it to get lost, or ignored by non-conlangers, here, so I started a new thread for it, called “The value of ambiguous speech”. This isn’t to say that it wouldn’t be great to see more discussion of the application of ambiguity to Ithkuil, but I didn’t want you to miss out on the wider thread if your attention was focused here.
Update: ChristianKl pointed out to me that I should put a forward link to the new discussion here (bear with me, I’m a newbie), so I’m going to try to edit one in after the fact.
Click here: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/n0o/the_value_of_ambiguous_speech/
responded to wrong person
So what would the second sentence be in Ithkuil?
I don’t speak ithkuil, but I have perused the website, and saw the update where he added location based conjugations.