No. An inability to make be vague doesn't help with being clear.
In English I can say: "Dear readers," without specifying gender. In German I have to say: "Liebe Leserinnen und Leser,". German forces me to order those words. I have to say one of the two genders first. "Liebe Leserinnen und Leser," doesn't have exactly the same meaning as "Liebe Leser und Leserinnen,"
The fact that the German language forces me to specify whether I put more weight on my male or female audience is just distracting. It doesn't help me express more of what I want to say.
Another problem of "Liebe Leserinnen und Leser," is that intersex people in the audience aren't included and therefore people who highly value political correctness might object to the phrase and use a phrase that signals more political correctness.
Having to think about gender when I don't want to think about gender costs cognitive capacity. The unspecific "Dear readers," is much easier to use and therefore better. Ithkuil forces cognitive capacity to be used to be explicit about certain distinctions.
Take a sentence like: "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 you will run into trouble because the sentence makes a lot of distinctions that ithkuil isn't well equipped to handle while at the same time ithkuil forces you to specify all sorts of stuff that you don't care about.
"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).
tê ömmilek audyal íčawëla tê adlaisakenniňk qe oeksrâ’as oimřalik akpʰialîk êntô’alakuňk
There you go. :) It's a very literal translation but it's overly redundant. A hypothetical native speaker would probably drop the "audyal" verb, deframe "íčawëla", and rely more on Ithkuil's extensive case system.
Incidentally, "Dear readers" is "atpëkein".
I'm working on a conlang (constructed language) and would like some input from the Less Wrong community. One of the goals is to investigate the old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis regarding language affecting cognition. Does anyone here have any ideas regarding linguistic mechanisms that would encourage more rational thinking, apart from those that are present in the oft-discussed conlangs e-prime, loglan, and its offshoot lojban? Or perhaps mechanisms that are used in one of those conlangs, but might be buried too deeply for a person such as myself, who only has superficial knowledge about them, to have recognized? Any input is welcomed, from other conlangs to crazy ideas.