Ilaksh - Possible Advantages

Possible Advantages

The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis postulates that a person’s language influences their perceptions and cognitive patterns. Stanislav Kozlovsky proposed, in the Russian popular-scientific magazine Computerra, that a fluent speaker of Ithkuil, accordingly, would think “about five or six times as fast” as a speaker of a typical natural language. One may also argue that, Ithkuil being an extremely precise and synthetic language, its speaker would, under the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, have a more discerning, deeper understanding both of everyday situations and of broader phenomena, and of abstract philosophical categories.

However, the creator of the language has stated he does not believe a speaker would think necessarily any faster, because even though the language is terse, a single word requires a lot more thought before it can be spoken than it would in a natural language.

"For these reasons, I believe use of Ithkuil would probably allow one to think more deeply, critically, and analytically; but think faster? I doubt it."

Kozlovsky also likened Ithkuil to the fictional Speedtalk from Robert A. Heinlein’s novella Gulf, and contrasted both languages with the Newspeak of the communicationally restricted society of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Ithkuil is by far the most complete language of the three. John Quijada acknowledged the similarity of Ithkuil’s design goals to those of Speedtalk, remarking that,

“owever, Heinlein’s Speedtalk appears to focus only on the morpho-phonological component of language Ithkuil has been designed with an equal focus on . Additionally, the apparent purpose of Heinlein's language is simple rapidity/brevity of speech and thought, while Ithkuil is focused on maximal communication in the most efficient manner, a somewhat different purpose, in which brevity per se is irrelevant.”