How the World's Most Complicated Language Works 

“A voiceless non-labialized lamino-postalveolar dorso-palatal grooved sibilant fricative” He is just talking about “sh”

Drunk Glasgow man is the worlds most complicated language actually.

I think this would make a neat "spell incantation" language since part of the very idea of magic words is that they are extremely specific and information dense. Also, the idea of the language being incomprehensible to those without special training is another common trope.

A language actually with phenomes (differentiable smells) would be amazing

Fun fact: Not one person can fluently speak Ithkuil, even the creator. So maybe you could be the first!

"Which means I must stress the final syllable." Immediately after that the presenter pronounces the word with the stress on the initial syllable.

As a linguist, all the mixing up of the "morpheme" and "phoneme" concepts in this video slightly triggers me, but I love how this video actually builds a word as an example for us. It is great. (By the way, you guys showed how the word should be stressed in the last syllable, but your final pronuntiation stressed the penultime syllable. It's still great, though, I just noticed it the second time around). Also, lots of the things here are suprasegmental stuff, and I have no idea on how the morpheme concept works with supragmental stuff. I'll assume it is pretty much the same as it is for segments, but if any fellow linguist would explain this to me, I'd be thankful.

This is the kind of language you would get if word cost $300 each.

This would be a perfect April fools video if it was fake.

Now imagine Aliens finding Ithkuil and trying to decipher it, thinking we were incredibly intelligent, complex beings.

"And now I must stress the final syllable" Immediately proceeds to stress the first syllable instead

Knowing the IPA, seeing someone trying to figure it out ,not knowing there's a wiki for it , hurts me on an emotional level

This language is genius, why bother with text compression when you can just compress your whole language. And People on twitter would love this language, it would give them even more characters to bully people

Ithkuil looks like the result of an AI developing a language for humans. Complete with lookup tables incorporating all the sounds that a human can make in an efficient grid. Ease of use and was definitely not a concern.

A similar conlang was described in the 1949 story "Gulf" by Robert Heinlein. The major problem with such a language is the lack of redundancy. Any mispronunciation, mishearing, speech impediment, tone-deafness, noisy environment or low-quality communications technology, means serious miscommunication.

Wow! This was amazing, entertaining and mind-boggling! However, as others have pointed out, there were some *glaring* mistakes in pronunciation. This was frustrating, because these were English words, and it was in a video having to do with advanced linguistics! Just in case a few of you didn't catch the goofs, I'll go ahead and describe (in detail!) the main ones I noticed. And these happened repeatedly - especially #1 (not necessarily in order): 1. "Phoneme" - the narrator keeps saying "FEE-nome," but it's supposed to be "FOE-neem." The automated captions hung on to the correct spelling a couple of times but finally capitulated to the erroneous pronunciation. 2. "Monadic" appears on the screen correctly spelled, but the narrator says "mondaic" ("mon-DAY-ick"), when it's supposed to be "mon-AD-ick." 3. "Delimitive" appears on the screen, but the narrator says "delimitate." The correct term is clearly an adjective, but the incorrect word, the way it's pronounced, sounds like a verb. 4. "Postalveolar:" it's "post-alveolar," not "postal-veolar" - the former refers to an anatomical location in the mouth, and the latter, uh, ... what's a "veolar," and what does it have to do with the US Mail service? [Sorry! 😜] I could point out a couple of other minor details, but my comment is already way too long! Feel free to point out any mistakes *I* made!

the rampant mispronunciation is just a cherry on top making sure, we, the audience, never forget that this video was, in fact, narrated by a dweeb

Even if everyone in the world magically forgot every language, and magically learned this one, this language wouldn't last. Just from usage, it would immediately begin to rapidly simplify and become something very different from its original.

Imagine this language inside video games or series to hide lore. The 1st text font would also work in a cyberpunk style

Andy from How to Make Everything went about making a language too with his community, its pretty cool how we are able to not only dynamically communicate but have the ability to fabricate new ways to do it just for the sake of doing so.

For awhile I wondered why some languages were so fast and long and they couldn’t be short and precise, now I realize why. this is pain inducing

HAI: complains that “voiceless non-labialized lamino-postalveolar dorso-palatal grooved sibilant fricative” tells him nothing IPA [ʃ] right there: am I a joke to you?

Hearing "phonemes" being said as "phenomes" and š being pronounced as s instead of sh had me rolling on the floor 😂

This reminds me a little of playing 20 questions with my much smarter kids. One that we had to guess was the abstract nail in the proverb (I guess) about 'for want of a nail'. So not only were there categories like Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral, but there were Figurative, Hypothetical, Fictional, and various other levels of abstraction.

as a linguist this "phenome" thing is really driving me up the wall

These super-information-dense languages seem great until you try to actually use them. Packing so much information into so little space with no redundancy means any minor error or damage can create a valid, but incorrect word. So you send a nice formal letter to your boss only to be fired because a smudge turned "working for you" into "screwing your mom". In English this can still happen ("car" and "can" differ by only a fraction of a letter), but usually there's enough redundancy that you can infer what the damaged/wrong worm was suposed to be, even if you omitted a letter entirely like I just did, or used the wrong word. Even if you an entire word it can still be understood.

I wanted to create a conlang for Demons in my novel. And it should be full of information in every word. And this conlang is an amazing example to study.

"Conlangs", or constructed languages, are a fascinating thing because there have been so many such languages created over time, by many different people. Yet (almost) none have ever actually gained acceptance as a universal L2 language, much less to become a living language. Constructed languages combine two basic human desires: to communicate with another human, and to engineer something for efficiency - and yet apparently these two desires are at some deep level, fundamentally incompatible! I highly recommend reading "In The Land of Invented Languages" by Arika Okrent for a history / survey / one person's foray into that world. Which includes exploring the extremely small number of people who have been raised with a constructed language from childhood as a "native" language - the two most commonly learned conlangs, Esperanto and yes, Klingon.

It is impossible to place implied or subtle meanings in this language because it's basically designed to convey messages in the most exact and comprehensive ways possible.

This is the language you use to write on the one note card you can use on a test

This development is really interesting, as an experiment to include all posible possibilities and nuances in a language. However the idea of compressing the information to the least amount of sounds doesn't make sense. It makes the language impossible to learn naturally: it had too much information density, it's like trying to learn a language with videos played at 10x. Also the language is not "noise proof" in opposition to a natural language where there is some meaning redundancy: with a natural language I may miss a sound and understand the word, or miss a word but understand the sentence by context. This language requires a supeinteligent person with perfect listening and perfect diction.

Such an amazing find this language. Thank you for the intro!

HAI: “linguistics sucks and we will never make a video on it again.” also HAI:

Sounds like somebody wanted revenge on their latin teacher.

A long time ago I read a science fiction novel (alas, I've forgotten both name and author) that contained something very much like this -- a race of beings with a very highly adapted language that allowed a speaker to do things like visit a factory, observe it, and come away with the ability to describe the entire factory using only a single word -- with the word containing all of the information necessary to completely reconstruct the factory.

5:36 I am eastern European, I use these special symbols above letters, I would pronounce it as "uok-sh-urn".

This seems like something Tom Scott would have "fun" with....

A few corrections: it's "phoneme" not "phenome", a voiceless non-labialised lamino-postalveolar Dorso-palatal grooved sibilant fricative is basically the "sh" sound (IPA: [ʃ]) and the "possessive" case in English is actually called the "genitive".

THIS IS AWESOME! If I can get this in hardcopy I'd definitely be interested in studying it. A tape of the phonetic pronunciation with mouth structure guide would also help. I also like how the written component is in runic lines. This would be a good language for archiving and for writing law, that way there is no ambiguity in what is written and it takes less space. Also, I thought Welsh was the world's most complicated language. Though I've heard that Georgian is up there in complexity too.

I want to have a single, A4 paper filled with small Ithkuil text framed on my bedroom wall. -"What is that?" +"Oh, that? Its the whole of Lord of the Rings hexalogy"

Text on the screen: "MONADIC" Sam: "Mondaic" Me: dying inside every time he says it

Now do a video on Toki Pona, the world's simplest con-lang.

There is a case argument (“X” pictured at 3:19) that you said had no equivalent structure in _any_ other language That isn’t the case for algebraic/geometric languages, in which those all correlate to various qualities of geometric patterns, mathematical objects, functions, and a few other things Definitely not the same kind of language, but its definitely still a language that people speak Edit: then you go pull the list of ‘Configuration’ options and boy oh BOI is that literally ripped straight from geometric, algebraic, and general set theory language I only know because I’ve been studying and using those relations and terms

this language reminds me so much of Basque, witch also has infinite numbers of look up tables and word constructing, so though it is like 10 times wors, I think it can really be used

So it’s sentences are really short? Oh man ithkuil translations of games would become dominant in speedrunning if they existed...

Every time he says “phenomes” I feel pain

This language is an agglutinative language much like my indigenous language Muysccubun (spoken my the Muyska people of the central Colombian Savannah) Its a really hard language to learn but after a while it becomes like solving a puzzle, its fun and information dense which makes conversations very interesting to witness

The most absolute of languages could be simply 'Organization' 'Arrangement' to have one character describing every possible combination of data and data itself, maybe a grid of infinite resolution fits within the character with each point on the grid representing binary to make it usable, just resize a page of english text into a character and boom you used the language

I will never complain about Latin again... :/ Maybe the Heptapods from Arrival will be able to speak it...

drinking game: drink every time sam mispronounces something

I could see this being the language of long-range spacecraft communications, being equivalent to a singular wavelength tone like a sonar ping, that no matter how stretched-out it got over space/time throughout the universe, one could simply re-compress the total waveform collected until it became "grammatically sound". This way, no matter where or when any intended thing was to be spoken towards, it could be sent and received no matter the level of distortion?

This may be an excellent language for future space comms. When speed of light is overcome by means of some very special cases (wuantum entanglement, information holographically written on event horizons of black holes, or more likely other effects we're yet to discover) where we can communicate alright, bjt at extremely limited bandwidth.

This language is the most efficient if you look at how much few words can say, but also the less efficient language if you look at how much work you have to make just one word.

The amount of times he said "phenome" actually made me doubt he wasn't just mispronouncing "phoneme". He was.

you can literally hear just how done he is with the whole thing lol

This is an awesome conlang to make complex ideas into a single word, I love it

Drink every time he says “phenomes” instead of “phonemes”.

Damn, where's Tom Scott when you need him...

This is like a language built for beings that don't have things like losing memories, this is a language for magic robot people.

this would be a great language to teach an AI, so it could translate from one language to another using this langauge as a go between. otherwise, the creator is insane to think any human would be able to use this language.

Imagine spending a week doing research for this video but not bothering to check how the word "phoneme" is pronounced.

I'm guessing soon Duolingo will email me with their new available language...

What is Morning Musume's native writing system? Hangul(14%) Kanji(78%) Mkhedruli(2%) Sanskrit(6%)

When the narrator mispronounced "phonemes" as "phenomes" the linguist nerd inside of me got flashbanged (1:04)

When I imagine how hyper-evolved beings from another planet would speak, this language would be the answer.

I feel like Tom Scott is better qualified for this video topic.

1:44 Sam casually mispronouncing the English "sh" sound preceded by "k"

I can see this being used to compress data so that with enough local power and smart enough AI to translate to media and render us information instantly.

As someone with a degree in linguistics, this made me want to paint the wall with my brains.

4:22 When language has space time continuum diagram to explain it

Ok, if we ever invent time travel remind me I have something very important to do in Baghdad somewhere before 1258 and that I must bring a notebook. Might make a stop at Alexandria if it's not full yet.

For whatever it's worth, the community surrounding Ithkuil _d e e p l y_ hates this video.

Hey! Ithkuilian here (I am not fluent in it, but I am interested in the language). Nice to see that you made the video. There is a version that’s work in progress (v4) and that doesn’t have a website yet, but it is much better than v3 (the version on the website) everything is much more simple, systematic and even more expressive. The Ca chart is half a page instead of that huge chart as well as there are more words and so on. I have no idea when will it be released but great news is that it can be learnt to fluency (no one has tried it yet, but we have gotten to the conclusion that it would be harder than natural languages, but definitely doable by humans).

Next video on Wendover Productions: The Logistics of Making Words in the World’s Most Complicated Language

1:47 the s with a hat is just pronounced "sh" so yeah I figured that out from the IPA transcription

I studied linguistics in college. Much like this language is made up of letters I recognize strung together in patterns I don't, I completely understood every single jargon term but still have no real understanding of the actual language

As an English-speaker learning Russian, when you said there are 96 cases, I had to hold back tears. 6 is bad enough.

1:05 "phenomes"?!?!?!?!??!?!?!! oh this one is going in the yearly inaccuracy compilation just you wait

1:56 I know what sound it makes because of the IPA. It makes a SH sound like when you're trying to shush someone at the library.

1:48 You could try reading the sentence right before that one, which literally says it's just the SH in shoe but with rounded lips.

I just realized that within this language, you would probably get "nickwords", words that mean an extremely specific concept in practice but within the local dialect of language would mean one thing that everyone recognizes as shared experience. It would be like an extremely specific dialect (for that shared concept or experience) of Ithkuil. My guess is that if this were ever blanketed across society, each local community would develop "minor languages" that normalize a broad group of concepts which are all agreed on by members of that community. Essentially, it will Babelize--split into an infinite number of infinitesimal languages, each of which expressing its own thoughts and ideas. I had another realization that this language is likely impossible to be a native speaker of. Even assuming every (adult) human on earth were fluent in Ithkuil, to understand the language requires an understanding of abstract concepts and the ability to discern nuanced associations between those concepts. This seems like it requires some level of metacognition that one does not gain the ability to reason about until a bit later into life. Until then relatively large portions of this language and understanding it are effectively "sealed off" to a younger brain. Very strange. What an interesting language. Somehow it reads like an intent to archive human experience. How many words of Ithkuil would span Moby Dick? Or Nietzche? Or Newton? So many questions...

Me: “I want to make a Conlang!” Conglangs:

After having learned multiple languages, I’ve honestly come to appreciate English quite a bit; it’s a pain to learn at first, but once I got over the hump, it was extremely easy to understand, pronounce, and compose. You can create precise sentences without too much thought, and there’s little grammatically defined idiomatic meanings, so it’s a pretty low bar when trying to comprehend writing or speech. Also not having to conjugate nouns, and having very few verb conjugations makes things simple.

According to the pronunciation guidelines, this pronunciation was abysmal. But the video was super interesting and I'm glad I don't have to do all that work to learn something about this language! Amazing concept.

Wild. I do have to point out it's kinda funny you keep saying "phenome" (the set of all phenotypes in a cell, organism, etc in the field of genetics) and not "phoneme" (a unit of sound)

Hello and welcome to Conlang Critic, the show that gets facts wrong about YOUR favorite conlang! I’m Jan Misali and today we will be looking at the hypothetical representation of a language, Ithkuil.

this would be such a good language for sending code in a spy movie. like the rule page is manual and whatever computers have the manual can decode the message

I'm now convinced that this thing I never heard of before this video is a particularly clever form of performance art. I imagine it was written by some polyglot teacher who got pissed at his students for not understanding Spanish, so he made up a new language for the purpose of teaching them what words mean to the point that all words become meaningless. It feels like a horrible curse bestowed by an angry god

HAI: "Why sound description so long?" IPA Symbol: "sssshhhhhhh"

HAI forgot how to pronounce phonemes. But hey we all know what a new language can do to old ones.

Two guys walk up to each other: Guy 1: Takes out ithkuil dictionary, and grammar guide. Guy 2: Takes out ithkuil dictionary, and grammar guide, readying himself for what he's about to hear. Guy 1: Takes out a pencil, a table, and a highlighter. Guy 2: Waits for the conversation to start. An arbitrary amount of time later. Guy 1: Attál.

If everybody had this language stored in their computer it could be a way to make extremely efficient data transfer with single words being only 1 character, then just make a large table then say whatever coordinate it is and it would be very fast and cheap so when sending documents it may be faster or loading a website like google or RU-vid.

Imagine writing an AI to use this as the base language to communicate with. The code could be dense and precise. It's a language that values data compression. This means entire books could have a somewhat readable compressed format. If each letter was given a number similar to Unicode you could compress the entire file even further.

My eyes twitched at every pronunciation of 'phenomes.'

3:21 OBJECTION! configuration is definetly comprable to number (singular/plural) in other languages

I don't know whether I should learn Ithkuli or not, but I like how it works anyway. *Use Polish for condensation and compression of real-life actions, scenes, or events.*

Am I the only one who wants to use this in D&D? As in: You finally managed to free the last of the Ithkuils from his seal. You ask him about the profecy. He answers. good luck guys.

Perfect for spellcasting and writing books, I can finally write an entire book on a single page.

I really like this video, it seems well thought out and quite interesting and has given me some interesting ideas. But I'm also second-guessing that assessment because before this I saw your toki pona video and that seemed like a botched hatchet job. :( I don't know if that's because that video had a different script writer or just because I actually know a bit about toki pona lol. But from what you portrayed in this video, Ithkuil seems like the exact opposite of toki pona lol. Fun fact, even the guy that invented Ithkuil doesn't claim any fluency in it lol.

It feels like you would need a PHD in this language just to have a conversation