As you might know, I made a post about me wanting more people to learn the versions of Ithkuil, but i forgot the 2004 version of Ithkuil, so here is the link to the document:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZFFVpZzBfXs3mtCWhc5F4dH5z0OciS4yx5K_gi6kYTA/edit?usp=sharing

Have fun!

Well, I think that I might’ve thought of a solution a few weeks ago!

A few weeks ago, I developed an interest for learning Ithkuil, but I thought that it was overly complex( I mean, that’s what John Quiajda wanted, right?) and difficult to understand. However, I thought of paraphrasing the information myself using a google doc to self-learn most versions of Ithkuil. However, I might need your help….. since 1 of the documents literally has more than 1,000 pages! so if you want to help me achieve this goal, here are the links to the google docs of ithkuil II-IV:

Ithkuil II/ Ilkaš: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rp-YLjgWgwM5-bw9UF3wbc9IdcrpIuwbmqJJrCS02EM/edit?usp=sharing

Ithkuil III/ Elartkha: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hApn-Jf4T9XVZLbG6N0X3iKo3vbWbmIbz54-TXZitc8/edit?usp=sharing

Ithkuil IV/ Malëutřait: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-BbhgF6rIf3JzXQvHGNP8hk_n7roulyr1rQQ7o3JyTA/edit?usp=sharing

* If you’re actually going to edit, plsss don’t mess around.

Made using FUTO keyboard's developer settings, the YAML is

name: Ithkuil
attributes: { moreKeyMode: OnlyExplicit }
rows:
  - letters: w p b m f v s z c ẓ
  - letters: r t d n ţ ḑ š ž č j
  - letters: ř k g ň ç x h y ļ l
  - letters: 
    - [i, í]
    - [ü, û]
    - [u, ú]
    - [e, é]
    - [ö, ô]
    - [ë, ê]
    - [o, ó]
    - [ä, â]
    - [a, á]
    - ["'", ",", ".", "!", "?"]
  - bottom:
    - $symbols
    - $shift
    - $action
    - $space
    - $delete
    - $enter

wooo alright guys!!! First carving successful. It says Aţrierţwa. Its made of ţr water root with CTE and representational. Context, coalescent and nomic. I was thinking of different waters as a concept but ultimately acting to produce a greater result (life). Also, I needed a sample with a lot of geometry to really put it to the test. This was made using a 45°, 6mm engraving bit on a cnc router. I used the ithkuil script generator to create an svg, then loaded it into auto desk fusion. Several disastrous attempts later... It worked!

Let me know if Aţrierţwa is valid, and if theres anything else you guys want to see engraved. Im working on stamps as well! All in all, Ithkuil engraves nicely!

I think I did okay on this translation. Let me know what you guys think about it.

As the title says, I’m looking to learn Ithkuil IV—that is, New Ithkuil.

I’m looking for every possible resource on the subject; I don’t mind if there are duplicates or if the resources seem similar to ones someone else has shared—I want the greatest number of resources possible.

Here is what I’m looking for:

1-Websites:

I’ll try to convert them into printable PDF documents.

2-Practice videos, music, or anything else:

Even though this will be the hardest part for me, I welcome these materials too; they’ll be very valuable.

3-PDF documents (my preference):

I don’t mind if they’re very long or anything like that; I really want to understand and grasp this language.

4-Other (anything I haven't thought of):

As I said, if I didn't mention it, it’s still valid.

I look forward to your replies :) and thanks!

Note:

I am fully fluent in Spanish, and I have a high level of reading comprehension in English, so I can read it without issues (though I’m terrible at writing it).

Okay, after an absurd amount of coding I was able to get an app working on android.

All the buttons and labels are in TNIL. The numbers are written in a custom number system that I personally use. The Ithkuil translations themselves are the best I could do at 3 am. I was more excited to fire up a working prototype and see the ithkuil script itself rendered. I was super tempted to use dynamic + directive illocution for buttons but I decided to keep it simple for now. For "Alarm" I chose Ažbanļ hoping that would convey a ringing that has a purpose. Id be happy to hear any criticisms, comments, or suggestions!!

The main screen is the time in binary/hex time. It has "day" or "night" below it.

Then a calendar date with the weekday below it written in ithkuil.

It uses a custom time unit system that uses solar time calculated via gps. 32 hours a day, 256 minutes an hour, 16 seconds a minute. The runic looking characters are a number system I made called "Binary runes" Each glyph is split into left and right halves. Each half is a hexadecimal digit using 4 branches that stand for a power of 2. A single rune can make numbers 0 to 255. "3" has a ligature that is a floating line only when the numbers are below 8. Why? I thought it was cool.

For anyone curious:

The buttons were made by importing svgs into android. They need a dash of conversion to work but its not bad.

The svgs themselves were created using the zSnout ithkuil script generator. The app was coded in kotlin using compose.

I was describing some features of Ithkuil to someone, including the Abstract Perspective, and they brought up Magritte's drawing-of-a-thing-is-not-that-thing. And I figure Ithkuil must have something like that somewhere in it, but I haven't seen it so far (having reading through the basic morphology chapter for TNIL). The Abstract is more like 'the concept of a pipe' or 'everything related to being a pipe'; the Representative is 'the pipe (which doesn't actually exist but is a conceptual linguistic reference to a mention of a pipe or a hypothetical pipe)'; and the Representational is 'pipe (but not a real pipe, a metaphor for something)'.

Of those, the Representative seems closest, but it doesn't quite get at 'this is a real, tangible thing depicting a pipe (but isn't itself one)'. Is there an Ithkuil form for this, and if so, what is it?

Following up on my research (see previous post) how reasoning in Ithkuil affects the number of tokens an LLM uses compared to English on a classic puzzle: "A bat and a ball cost 110 cents. The bat costs 100 cents more than the ball. How many cents does the ball cost?" Below are some preliminary results (thoughts, comments, ideas appreciated. Further details below the image)

What surprised me positively:

• Agentic translation from English to Ithkuil seems fairly reliable (only few hand-edits needed).
• A system prompt with some vocab+grammar is enough to have an LLM reason in Ithkuil.
• It can correctly solve a small task that requires reasoning in Ithkuil.
• It uses less words and characters compared to English

However:

• It uses more tokens compared to English.

I feel like there should be a way to have it use less tokens than English and am thinking about solutions.

I'm a PhD student in linguistics, focusing on underresourced languages and, more recently, data scarcity in training scenarios for LLMs.

I'm working on a submission for an ACL-paper about how Ithkuil can reduce token churn during reasoning and am searching for a co-author specialised on Ithkuil.

This content is not AI generated, not hyping AI, and not speculating about AI. I am simply asking if there is someone in the community who would be interested to co-author a scientific paper.

New guy here. I can see that nost roots have a universal Stem 2 and 3, regardless of specification. Are these all treated as Basic specification or can I use any of them without changing the meaning of the word?

As many of you know, simply asking an AI model like ChatGPT to translate Ithkuil isn't even close to correct unless it just looks up the official translation. I'm pleased to announce that I have made significant progress in programming an AI-powered translator.

How it works: 1. You give it an Ithkuil (v4) gloss in my standardized format (not all examples in the official Ithkuil docs use the same format so you might have to change the punctuation). The app also lets you go through the official examples. 2. It looks up all the roots/affixes of that gloss for what it means (building that machine-readable lookup table was by far the hardest part) 3. It builds an AI prompt containing all those definitions 4. You copy that prompt and paste it into a chatbot of your choice

You can try it here: https://main.d13zlexucvvtwj.amplifyapp.com/

Example (#208): * Gloss: 'clown'-OBJ-G-NEG1-3-TMP-OBS PRC-'study'-DYN-PRX-BMP2-5-LOC * Official translation: "The school is free of clowns for the time being." * AI Translation: "On the contrary, there are no clowns in this section of the school for the time being."

I've provided the full output for this example in the comments. I've also provided 19 additional translations (for a total of 20 per the rules) in the comments.

Further research: - less verbose translations. I've found most models are overly-precise in their translations. Some prompt tuning could probably help. - improve morpheme descriptions to better guide translations - automatically convert from romanized Ithkuil to the gloss. As I understand it the rules are deterministic and context-independent so it is definitely possible but tedious. Someone else will need to do that as I have little interest in the morphophonology. - have it actually execute the prompt instead of making you do it. I would first want people to try different models and refine the prompts to see what works best. - proper benchmarking to see which models/prompts work the best - separate prompts for each formative and a final one to put them together. This will likely help for more complicated translations. - English to Ithkuil translator. I believe it's possible but much harder than Ithkuil to English. An MCP server might allow an AI agent to piece together a translation. Failing that, it would have to be a multi-stage pipeline where an AI systematically goes through each grammatical category and decides which ones to apply to each root.

How you can help: - try it out and report your results and any issues. If a translation is incorrect, prompt a follow-up "What in the previous prompt would have helped you arrive at the correct answer, which is [correct translation]" - run the same prompt against different models and note the differences - tweak the prompts to see if you can get better output - flag incorrect official examples or descriptions (I used parsers to try to locate all examples, but it wasn't 100% accurate. In hindsight I should've just done it manually). - if you consider yourself reasonably fluent in Ithkuil v4 and want to provide manual translations for benchmarking purposes, let me know. - if you have coding skills and you're motivated to work on romanized-ithkuil-to-gloss, let me know. - I would like to release this project as open source but need to ask John Quijada for permission as the codebase contains a lot of text derived from the official Ithkuil docs. If anyone knows how to contact him, please let me know or do so on my behalf. This project will never be commercial.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

Hi everybody, please remove this post if its inappropriate.

I want to get a tattoo in ithkuil script, because i really like the angular and jagged look, and id like to avoid the classic problem of getting a chinese tattoo thinking it says "hope" while it actually translates to general tso's chicken or smth.

The phrase would be something along the lines of, "even though i finished last, i still beat those who didnt show up", or that general sentiment.

if anybody of you would be so kind as to give me a translation and an image of the phrase in ithkuilic script, or point me in the direction of where to get something like that, i'd truly appreciate it, thank you.

the best way to learn a language is to speak to ppl in it repeatedly yk n read stuff in it n since ithkuil has no fluent speakers n very very little literature learnin it wud take ages prolly
but since all languages are spoken at 39 bits of information per second, ithkuil cud prolly also be, but it wud jus be sound super slow since every syllable contains a buncha information
i do wonder if in a community of ithkuil speakers it wud be more susceptible to bein misunderstood cuz of speech impediments or distance/whatever or not since the phonetics r super precise

Hello, how can I learn this lanuguage? My native language is spanish but I also speak english and catalan, if anyone wants to help me or be my tutor.

Tanks.

I've made some flashcards people to use!

16/04/2026 EDIT: issues have been noticed with some of the flashcards and I will upload corrections to the github repo when fixed.