Ithkuil by Example

Ithkuil has 30 consonants bcčçdḑfghjklļmnňprřsštţvwxyzžẓ, 9 vowels aäeëiöoüu, and the glottal stop ‘.

Ithkuil vowels can be stressed. To mark a vowel as stressed, change aeiou to áéíóú and äëöü to âêôû.

Ithkuil also has 10 diphthongs: ai au ei eu ëi ou oi iu ui ëu. These should be pronounced as a smooth flow from the first vowel to the second, not as two separate vowels. To stress a diphthong, stress the first letter, as in ái êi ói.

An Ithkuil syllable contains one vowel or diphthong.

There are four types of stress in Ithkuil:

We’ll learn about how stress affects words later.

In Ithkuil, a root is the core element of meaning. Some roots are more similar to English nouns, and some are more similar to English verbs, but they’re treated identically in Ithkuil.

To actually use an Ithkuil root as part of a word, you need to pick one of its three stems. A stem is a sub-meaning of the full root:

Stem 1 always starts with a-, stem 2 always starts with e-, and stem 3 with u-.

There is also a Stem Zero form, which encompasses all three stems. It’s written with o- before the root.

The simplest sentence in Ithkuil is a “there is an X” sentence. As in:

It’s simple: just a stem followed by -alá.

For more verb-like stems, this form indicates that the verb is happening, but doesn’t tell us who performs it or how.

All stems have four specifications. Like how a stem is a more specific version of a root, a specification is a more specific version of a stem.

Here are some examples of various stems and their specifications:

Usually, specifications follow this pattern:

The Contential and Constitutive forms typically complement each other, and together make up the Basic form. The Objective form is typically hard to infer.

We can use different Specifications in our “there is…” statements. Instead of stem + -alá, we’ll now have specification + -lá:

That final stressed -á at the end of our “there is…” sentences? It represents a grammatical category called Validation. Validation indicates how you know a fact to be true—­what evidence you have.

Ithkuil has nine Validations, each of which can end a word:

So far we’ve just been using the Observational, by ending our words with -á. So our words azvalá haven’t been “there is a dog”; that one is more like “I perceive there is a dog”.

Here are examples of various Validations:

By the way, whatever word in a sentence has Validation is the main verb. In “there is…” sentences, the only word is the main verb. A sentence cannot have multiple main verbs; a new main verb implicitly starts a new sentence.

First interlude! (That’s what the trail signs mean.) In this document, interludes are mini-review sections.

For this one, we’ll look at the overall structure of words we can make so far.

For now, it looks like we have four grammatical categories to play with, plus the root. Root typically isn’t counted as a grammatical category, since there are 6000 different roots. Nice!

The lone -l-? It’s part of something called the C_A slot, which we’ll discuss later.

Ithkuil uses a case system. This means that instead of word order, Ithkuil attaches suffixes to nouns to indicate their role in a sentence.

What does that mean?

In English, to say “the dog bites the cat”, you have to put the word in a very specific order. First, “the dog”, since they’re the subject (the one doing the biting). Second, “bites”, since it’s the verb (the action). Third, “the cat”, since they’re the object (the one who is bitten).

If you wanted to switch the roles of subject and object, you’d have to reverse the sentence into “the cat bites the dog”. And good luck trying to move that verb anywhere besides the middle of the sentence without sounding archaic or like Yoda (“the cat the dog bites!”).

Ithkuil uses a different system, where this sentence would look more like bites-á dog-o cat-e. The -á on “bites” tells us that it’s the verb, the -o on “dog” tells us it’s the one doing the biting, and the -e on the “cat” tells us it’s the one who is bitting.

Using little markers like this also gives Ithkuil more flexibility. We can totally rearrange the words in our sentence, and it still makes sense! bites-á dog-o cat-e = dog-o cat-e bites-á, since all the words have the same roles.

Some languages stop here. They say, “we’ve got a subject case and an object case. what else could you possible need?”

Ithkuil instead opted to go with having 68 cases. (It used to have 96, but its author did some cleaning up.)

That might sound like a lot, but it’s actually significantly smaller than role marking words in, say, English. English uses prepositions (words like with, by, on, near, before, and during) for most of what Ithkuil calls cases, and English has hundreds of prepositions! So Ithkuil having only 68 cases is actually quite nice. Plus, you only need to learn a few at a time, so it’s manageable.

Now that we’ve covered what “case” means, onto the first nine Ithkuil cases!

Before I explain any more, here’s an overview of the nine so-called Transrelative Cases, some of the most common cases in Ithkuil:

Before learning how these work in Ithkuil, let’s try figuring out which of these nine roles best fit various nouns in some English sentences.

1. The dog paints the cat blue with a paintbrush.
2. I hear a bee.
3. You entertain your friends.
4. She is running.
5. The machine throws a ping-pong ball at him.

Try guessing the Case of each highlighted noun. Since you don’t have that much experience with Case yet, don’t worry about getting them wrong.

How do we use these in Ithkuil? Basically, do the normal formula for a “there is” verb, but instead of ending it with a Validation, we’ll end it with a Case.

The only difference between a word with Validation and a word with Case is the stress, so make sure to write it properly!

Of course, these are just lone words. To put them into a sentence, just… put them in a sentence! Normally, nouns go after the main verb, but you can put a noun before the main verb to emphasize it, sort of like English italics or underlining.

Let’s attach all our nouns to this verb:

In order to make our first big sentence:

Referentials are Ithkuil’s pronouns. They’re simple compared to the formatives we’ve been talking about so far, and just look like some consonants followed by a case ending:

To add a referential to a sentence, just place it anywhere! Like with nominal formatives, they typically go after the main verb, but you can put them before the main verb to emphasize them.

Each referent (the consonant part) comes in three variants: neutral, beneficial, and detrimental. This lets you say whether the action or state is good, bad, or neutral for that referent.

Here’s the full table of referents. They have strange abbreviations. Also, singular is called monadic and abbreviated as m, and plural is called polyadic and abbreviated as p.

Looks like a big table! However, it’s only 33 entries, and you can usually find what you’re looking for pretty easily.

Try making the following words.

1. me (beneficial, EFF)
2. you (singular, detrimental, AFF)
3. her (neutral, STM)
4. those things (detrimental, INS)

One notable thing missing from the list above is “we”. Ithkuil doesn’t have a single consonant for “we”, since “we” can be “me and you”, “me and somebody else”, “me and you and someone else”, “me and me in the mirror”, and various other combinations.

To make pronouns like “we”, just smush the consonant forms of the component referents together:

If it’s hard to pronounce a consonant cluster you’ve created, just insert ë between various consonants, or at the beginning, whichever makes it work.

Last thing! If you have two of these short referentials next to each other, you can merge them into a single word by flipping the second one and inserting a w or y between them:

The next five grammatical categories we’re going to learn are all part of something called the C_A slot, sometimes called the C_A complex. The capital C stands for consonant, since it’s always one or more consonants, but never has any vowels. The _A doesn’t really mean anything.

When all five grammatical categories in the C_A slot take their default values, the slot just becomes -l-. This is what that lone -l- in all our formatives has been: it’s an empty C_A slot.

Here’s a rough overview of the five grammatical categories in the C_A slot. We’ll look at each one in depth later, so don’t worry if you don’t understand them yet.

The C_A slot essentially operates by sticking the consonant forms for all five of these categories together and calling it a day. It’s a bit more complicated, but that’s the rough idea.

By the way, the C_A only exists on formatives. Referentials don’t have C_A slots.

Ever thought about how strange it is that English has totally different words for forest, jungle, grove, wood, and orchard, despite the fact that they’re basically variants of “group of trees”?

In Ithkuil, instead of memorizing these five words, we can just conjugate the word alḑala (tree) to make them by using Configuration, the grammatical category which makes pairs and groups of things.

Some examples before we get into conjugations:

Configuration is really made up of three smaller categories, which combine together in a sort of grid. Each category has three possible values:

This gives us twenty total Configurations, abbreviated as Plexity, then Similarity, then Separability:

Notice UPX and DPX sitting at the top, alone. Why are they there?

• If Plexity is Uniplex, we’re only talking about one thing, and it wouldn’t make sense to also apply Similarity and Separability. Therefore, there is only one Configuration which uses Uniplex, and we abbreviate it UPX.
• DPX is there in case you want to use Duplex, but don’t want to specify Similarity and Separability. There is no such equivalent for Multiplex, so you can’t specify Multiplex without also specifying Similarity and Separability.

Now we can go back to the examples I put up before. Here’s each one and its corresponding Configuration:

Finally, let’s see the conjugation tables for all Configurations. Note that the first row is for plain UPX and DPX.

To mark Configuration, replace the C_A slot with the appropriate consonant form from the table above:

Try coming up with Configurations to describe each of these phrases (book, oxygen gas, etc.) in terms of its components (sheet of paper, oxygen atom, etc.). For extra fun, also make the Ithkuil words for each one!

1. Turn sheet of paper (aḑgwala) into book.
2. Turn oxygen atom (aňnala) into oxygen gas (hint: oxygen gas is a molecule made of two oxygen atoms).
3. Turn to vote (urnyala) into to vote on several things.
4. Turn a coincidence (orcala) into a series of coincidences.
5. Turn something retained from the past (emzala) into an archive.

Affiliation describes how related something’s purposes or functions are. Is there a single purpose, or many? If many, are they a means to an end, or are they unrelated?

English usually marks purpose by word choice. For instance, the word “grove” just means “a group of similar trees”. However, if those trees were planted by design, they might instead be called an orchard. Similarly, a group of people might be a simple gathering, neutral with respect to purpose, or a team, all working together to achieve a common objective, or a crowd with an absence of purpose.

Ithkuil, on the other hand, marks purpose with a consonant in the C_A slot, making it possible to derive words like orchard, team, and crowd without needing to memorize more vocab.

Here is an overview of the four Affiliations. We’ll talk a little more about each one later.

If all C_A categories are default (for now, that means Uniplex Configuration) except Affiliation, the C_A becomes the parenthesized Affiliation form (nļ, rļ, or ň). Otherwise, it becomes the normal Affiliation form (l, r, or ř) followed by the Configuration form. Here are some example usages:

Let’s talk a little more about each Affiliation.

• CSL (Consolidative)

  CSL is great if you don’t know the purpose or intent of something, or if it’s not important. It’s commonly used on nouns in the Uniplex, where purpose or function isn’t that important, and on verbs in the Uniplex, where it signifies that the action is neutral with respect to purpose.

• ASO (Associative)

  Good use cases for ASO on groups include things like turning a single soldier into a troop. It’s also useful for marking a unity in the purpose of a single thing, as in a well-formed rock, a tree with integrity or a balanced work of art.

  On verbs, the CSL vs. ASO distinction can specify that a verb was done with intention. A sentence like “I look at the window” has no sense of purpose in CSL, but with ASO, it indicates that looking at the window was done for some unspecified reason.

• COA (Coalescent)

  COA works well on groups which work together. For instance, group of tools could become toolbox in the COA, since each tool does a different job (a screwdriver and saw are totally different, for instance), but they all work to help with construction.

  Another example: food could become well-balanced meal, since each piece of food on a plate serves a different purpose (carbohydrates, proteins, and fibers are quite different), but they all work to build a single meal.

  COA is also often used with Duplex groups, since two items in a pair typically complement each other, such as how your two ears hear in different directions but work together to build a single mental image of where sounds originate.

  Finally, COA can go on verbs to emphasize that each component of the verb works together. For instance, it distinguishes “He traveled in the Yukon” (CSL), which doesn’t really feel like it has any purpose, from “He ventured in the Yukon” (COA), which tells us that he spent time in the Yukon, likely to see many things or hike many trails.

• VAR (Variative)

  VAR is for when the purposes of something are in conflict with each other or are totally unrelated. It could be used to make a cacophony of notes, somebody at odds with themselves, a chaotic piece of art, or a rag-tag group.

  On verbs, the Variative can describe especially complicated phenomena. For instance, if you described a light blinking as the MSC of a single light blink, adding VAR would mean that each blink signals something different.

Extension, the third C_A category, lets us pick a portion of an object or event to focus on, like the phrases “beginning of”, “end of”, “part of”, and “entirety of” in English.

Here are the six Extensions:

DEL, being unmarked (its form is empty), is what we’ve used up until now in our formatives. Notice how ICP and ATV complement each other, and how GRA and DPL are basically the slow fading equivalents of ICP and ATV.

Here are some English phrases in each Extension to give you an idea of what they do:

To mark Extension in the C_A slot, put its normal form (t/k/p/g/b) after the Affiliation and Configuration forms. If the word has UPX (Uniplex) Configuration, use the form with a little ₁ subscript (d/g/b/gz/bz). This makes:

Let’s look at some examples of using different Extensions for the same English sentence.

1. She climbed the tree.

   If we put “climb” in DEL, it emphasizes that she climbed the entire tree, from beginning to end. If we instead put “climb” in PRX, it tells us that he only climbed a portion of the tree, but not the whole thing.

2. The tree is hard there.

   Here, “tree” is probably best in PRX, since the tree was apparently only checked for hardness in one place, and we don’t know about the rest of the tree. If we used ICP, it could instead connote that we checked the bottom of the tree, since that’s where trees start from. Or we could use ATV to say “the tree is hard in the tips of its branches”.

3. Let’s wait for daybreak.

   If we use ICP for “daybreak”, it emphasizes that the transition from night to day happens rather quickly, or that we don’t care about the transition. If we instead use GRA, it tells us that the transition happens slowly, with the sun gradually rising over the horizon.

4. We await your arrival.

   ATV is probably the best choice for “arrival”, since we’re waiting for your arrival to complete. If we’re in a busy place, where part of your arrival includes parking and walking to our meeting location, I don’t care when you park—I’m waiting for you to finish your arrival and be at my location, not for you to pay the parking meter.

5. She disappeared into the twilight.

   DPL works best here if the disappearance was slow, as if she walked into the night. If the disappearance was rapid or instantaneous, ATV could also work.

Perspective is Ithkuil’s way of marking number (singular, plural, collective, etc.). The four Perspectives are:

Here are some phrases in each Perspective as examples:

Some important notes:

• Singular of a group: Notice how even though we originally created grove as “a set of similar, separate trees”, which implies a plural of “tree”, we can still have a singular grove: a single set of similar, separate trees. This differs from the Agglomerative, which would indicate at least one set of similar, separate trees, or at least one grove.

• Mass nouns: English separates nouns into so-called “count nouns”, which can be counted (trees, rivers, bears, etc.), and “mass nouns”, which are uncountable (dust, snow, electricity).

  In Ithkuil, these categories don’t exist. Instead, mass nouns become their smallest units (a speck of dust, a snowflake, a spark of electricity) in the Monadic, and their collective forms (dust, snow, electricity) in the Agglomerative.

• The Nomic: The Nomic is used when you talk about something in general. For instance, if I said “I like dogs”, I don’t mean that I like some particular dogs, I mean that I like dogs in general (that is, all dogs). Therefore, “dog” goes in the Nomic.

  On verbs, the Nomic indicates things which are always true as a state of nature. For instance, if I said “Apples fall downwards”, the verb “fall” and the noun “apples” would go in the Nomic, since apples fall in general, due to the laws of physics.

  If instead “apples” was in the Agglomerative and “fall” was in the Monadic, it would become “at least one apple is currently falling downwards”, which is probably not the intention.

• The Abstract: The Abstract is used to talk about the quality of being or doing something (as in redness and grovehood). If I said “I like red”, it would roughly mean “I like things which are red” in the Nomic, but “I like the quality of being red” in the Abstract.

  The Abstract is useful for making timeless verbs, like infinitives (to breathe, to sing, to walk) and gerunds (breathing, singing, walking). For instance, in the sentence “Singing is not their strong suit”, the word singing goes in the Abstract, since they’re bad at the quality of singing. Or in “It makes no sense to worry about it”, to worry goes in the Abstract, since the quality of worrying about it is what doesn’t make sense.

Adding Perspective to a C_A form is easy: tack its normal consonant form (—/r/w/y) after Affiliation, Configuration, and Extension. Like Affiliation, Perspectives have standalone forms (l/r/v/j) which you use if nothing else is specified.

Here are some examples of conjugated Perspectives:

Essence is the final C_A category. It asks a simple question: is something real or hypothetical? There are two flavors of Essence:

NRM (Normal) Essence is what we’ve used so far in our formatives, and it’s the default Essence.

When do you use RPV (the Representative)? Examples are the easiest way to demonstrate it.

• The boy ran off to sea.

  Everything in this sentence is NRM, since the boy and sea appear to exist, and the running definitely happened.

• They can sing beautifully.

  Here, they may never sing again, so sing needs to be in RPV, since it’s a description of something which might not actually happen. On the other hand, they do seem to exist, so they can be in NRM.

• The clown imagines they are seeing a ghost.

  Here, the clown is NRM, since they exist. The seeing, however, should be RPV, since it was only imagined, and didn’t actually happen. Finally, the ghost is in NRM, since it exists within the context of the clown’s seeing, which was already marked RPV.

  If we marked both the seeing and the ghost as RPV, the sentence would more closely resemble “The clown imagines they are seeing what they imagine to be a ghost”, which is likely not what we want.

• She’s going to walk to the beach.

  Here, we can’t be certain whether the walking can happen, since it’s in the future tense, so it needs to be RPV. She and beach can both be NRM though, since they exist.

Unlike the other C_A categories, Essence does not add a new consonant form to the overall C_A form. Instead, the Perspective form changes if Essence is RPV. Here is the complete chart:

You already know the NRM column; it’s the Perspective values from the last section.

The RPV column isn’t too difficult to use. Normally, you just attach the normal form (l/ř/m/n) after Affiliation, Configuration, and Extension. There are two exceptions:

• If you’re using M+RPV and it’s the only thing in the C_A slot, use the standalone -tļ- form instead of -l-. This distinguishes it from plain M+NRMm, which would also be -l-.
• If you’re using N+RPV or A+RPV and the -m-/-n- would come after a consonant followed by -t, -p, or -k, use the ₂ form (h/ç).

Some examples contrasting NRM and RPV conjugations:

Congratulations! You’ve officially learned all five grammatical categories marked in the C_A complex. We’ve just got a few finishing touches to get to, and we’ll be done.

Before getting to that, let’s make a sentence using every feature of the C_A complex to celebrate what we’ve learned so far.

It may not make much sense, but look how much meaning we can shove into just a few consonants! Ithkuil is quite cool for that, in my opinion.

However, we’ve got some problems. First, C_A forms are not allowed to have the same consonant twice in a row (this is for reasons which we’ll talk about later). Second, lots of our C_A forms are difficult or impossible to pronounce. For instance:

To solve these problems, we apply a set of changes onto the C_A forms once we’ve finished assembling them from Affiliation + Configuration + Extension + Perspective/Essence. They are:

The first three columns are straightforward. If you see -tt- in a C_A form, change it to -nt-. If you see -kg-, change it to -ng-. If you see -rř-, change it to -nš-. And so on.

The fourth column contains substitutions which only happen after a consonant. For instance, if you see bm- at the beginning of a C_A, don’t change it to v-, since there’s no consonant before it. However, if you see -rbm-, that should change to -rv-, since the -bm- is now preceded by the consonant -r-.

This applies to everything in column four; only substitute, say, -gn- for -ň- if the -gn- is after another consonant.

The fifth column contains exceptions to the first four columns. For instance, if you had a C_A of fbm, you would first apply the rule to change -bm- to -v-, since it’s after the consonant f-. However, fv is still illegal according to Ithkuil’s rules for how sounds can combine, so we change it again, this time from fv to vw.

Another example: in the C_A form rçgm, we first notice that we can replace rçgm for rçx, according to column four. Then, we replace rçx with rxw, according to column five. However, if the C_A were just çgm instead, with no r-, we would only change it to çx, not xw.

These changes are called a C_A complex’s allomorphic substitutions.

As an exercise, check each of these C_A forms, and perform any necessary allomorphic substitutions.

That’s it! We’ll do a quick recap of C_A structure in the next chapter, and then call it a day.

Now that we’ve learned every component of the C_A complex, let’s make a quick summary table of its structure.

It’s a lot, for sure. But it’s a really useful summary of all the C_A conjugations we’ve had to learn. Plus, it doesn’t look that bad, so you could print it and use it as a reference for word-making!

Ready for the final exercise? Here are the C_A forms from last chapter. Figure out what the Affiliation, Configuration, Extension, Perspective, and Essence are for each one.

This section is a record of all errors I’ve corrected so far.

A not-at-all-brief list of everything that still needs to be explained.

Click here to compute the size and approximate word count of each section. Note that the size is computed as the height in pixels of the section, so it depends on your screen's width.

Once the table is generated, you can click the Words and Size columns to sort by their values.