selylindi comments on Linguistic mechanisms for less wrong cognition - Less Wrong

7 Post author: KevinGrant 29 November 2015 02:40AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 29 November 2015 05:27:46PM *  1 point [-]

In English I can say: "Dear readers," without specifying gender.

"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 one of us has misunderstood ithkuil (it may be me). I've only done a bit of looking into it, but my understanding is that it can do both of what you mentioned above. The difference is that you can't say "dear readers" of a non-specific gender without specificying that you mean a non-specific gender. Which means you only say "dear readers of a non-specific gender" if you know that's who you're addressing, if you're addressing only male readers it would be a completely different sentence. In other words, you can be general but you can't be ambiguous. If you're trying to get clearer in your thinking, this is a property you want.

Ithkuil also has all sorts of conujugations that get very specific with object placement and relation to one another. It's almost ideally suited for your second sentence.

Comment author: selylindi 30 November 2015 02:46:59AM *  0 points [-]

responded to wrong person