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.
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.