Re: Politics and the Constructed Language

Sai Emrys wrote:
>> Could a language be structured in such a way that, systemically, it
>> acts against the sort of obfuscatory language as in that essay (and as
>> in vast amounts of modern politics, journalism, academia, etc.)?
-----------------------------------------------------
David J. Peterson wrote:

>Wasn't this the purpose behind Lojban?  And can't Ithkuil be
>used in just this way?
-----------------------------------------------------
As for Ithkuil, yes and no (if you'll permit me to obfuscate a bit).  While
Ithkuil morphological and morpho-semantic structures are geared to prevent
this sort of vagueness and obfuscation, it is still quite possible to use
the precision of Ithkuil to obfuscate and be deliberately vague.  The only
real difference is that if you want to obfuscate and be vague in Ithkuil,
you have to do it overtly rather than covertly.  For example, Ithkuil
provides several morphological categories and affixes for speaking
metaphorically, as well as several morphologically overt means by which to
inject fuzzy logic into one's words, however, the presence of the
morpho-phonological forms within the words for these categories overtly
announces to your listener that you are doing so deliberately.

Also, Ithkuil's marginal oligosynthesis would appear to be suspect according
to one possible reading of the following passage from Orwell's essay
(depending on how you define "sheer humbug":

'As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in
picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in
order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long
strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and
making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way
of writing is that it is easy. It is easier -- even quicker, once you have
the habit -- to say "In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption
that" than to say "I think." '

So all in all, I'd say Ithkuil could fit the bill to a fair extent but not
mandatorily so.  The online Ithkuil grammar has more to say about these
sorts of matters in both the Introduction and in Chapter 10.

--John Q.

Reply