Talk:Ithkuil

Clowns

I think it is important to mention clowns somewhere. Rursus dixit. (^mbork³!) 14:36, 1 April 2010 (UTC) Actually, that wouldn't be important, no matter how common Quijada's Ithkuil examples involve clowns. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Braden1127 (talk • contribs) 13:21, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

Major errors in John Quijada biographical info

Hi, John Quijada (Ithkuil’s creator) here. Could someone please edit and correct the embarrassing errors in my biographical info on the Ithkuil wikipedia page? I’d do it myself, but I don’t believe in editing a wikipedia article about oneself or one’s own work. Personally, I don’t know why this article even needs a bio section; it’s supposed to be about my work, not me. But if I simply delete it, someone will just undelete it and the errors will still be there. At any rate, the errors and needed corrections are as follows:

I am NOT my parents’ first child. I have an older brother and sister, as well as a 7-minute younger identical twin brother.

The list of languages I speak is in error. I do not speak German but I do speak Italian. The statement that I claim to be able to recite phrases in Catalan and Interlingua is untrue. I make no such claims, as I do not speak those two languages, although I can READ them.

The story of how I got into conlanging is incorrect. There was no Esperanto club involved. I got into conlanging solely after discovering the music and lyrics of the French avant-garde jazz group MAGMA. (I had previously read Tolkien and admired his Elvish languages, but they did not inspire me to try conlanging myself.)

I did not attend the University of California. My linguistics degree is from one of the California State Universities.

ALSO: The wikipedia article contains a graphic insert near the beginning purporting to show the names of the four versions of the language. The inset makes it appear as if those are officially sanctioned names. Only the names of the first two versions of the language are correct. The names “elartkha” and “mal…(whatever the rest is)” given for the third and fourth versions of the language are simply nicknames that certain fans of the language like to use. They are NOT the names of the language.

--JQuijada21 (talk) 16:57, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

This can be an awkward situation where people a lot more famous than you (such as Philip Roth) have had difficulty getting Wikipedia to change. The official page to look at is apparently Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons/Help (not sure how helpful it really is. AnonMoos (talk) 18:23, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

The list of languages was blatantly incorrect according to the cited source (the FAQ page on the Ithkuil website), so I have corrected it. The false claim of you being the eldest child has been removed (it was also not sourced). The "utopian politics of Esperanto" claim appears to originate from the New Yorker article (though the paragraph actually cited a French translation of the article, I have changed that.) However, I am not entirely sure how to proceed given that the source makes an incorrect claim there. For now, I have placed a {{dubious}} on it. The university has been corrected according to the New Yorker source too. The unofficial names for Ithkuils 3 and 4 have been replaced with alphabetical transcriptions of the name "Iţkuil" as in the infobox, which is also consistent with example sentences on the Ithkuil website (for both versions). Wilh3lm^Talk 00:39, 2 November 2024 (UTC)

Pronunciation?

The pronunciation of "Ithkuil" in the sidebar seems dubious. Can we source it? FWIW, Wiktionary has /ˈɪθkwɪl/. 122.213.236.53 (talk) 10:24, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

The word "Ithkuil" comes from the first version of the language, where iţkuîl meant roughly "hypothetical representation of a language" and was pronounced /ɪθˈkʊ.il˥˩/. This is the same realization as shown in the sidebar (minus the word's tone). The phonology of the first Ithkuil language is archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20090608003709/http://www.ithkuil.net/ithkuil-ch1-phonology.htm - although most of the images used for texts with special characters are missing, it should still be enough. In Ithkuil version 3, the name is rendered as iţkuil, which is pronounced /ˈɪθkʊi̯l˥˩/ (Note that the diphthong is falling [ʊj]~[uj], not rising [wi]). Version 4 also renders it as iţkuil, pronounced /ˈiθkui̯l/. I recommend keeping the pronunciation used in Ithkuil v1. Wilh3lm^Talk 19:51, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

TNIL name in TNIL

Attalunkí ru nü! I've seen some user interaction on the Ithkuil Discord server about the name of TNIL in TNIL. The name they're using now is "Maţřëullait" which roughly means "this system of repeating utterances"; compare with "Malëuţřait" which roughly means "this system of repeating oneself of an utterance." Hasbi Ashidy (talk) 16:35, 30 November 2025 (UTC)