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Oh hey there.

How's it going?

Did you have a good week?

Yeah I bet you did, because I bet you weren't stupid enough to try to write a video explaining

the most complicated language in the world.

It's called Ithkuil, and it's a conlang—a non-natural, engineered language—developed

by genius-slash-madman-who-stole-a-week-of-my-life John Quijada, and if you want to learn it

and have your mind collapse into itself like mine, you can read this comically long online

guide.

How long is it?

Well, I don't know.

I tried to find out by pasting it into a word document, but that crashed my computer.

Anyways, ironically, Ithkuil is intended to be maximally precise, while using the fewest

letters possible.

And, to be fair, it succeeds—for example, these two Ithkuil words translate to “On

the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some

point.”

Ithkuil makes few word do trick by making each word extraordinarily information-dense.

Think of Ithkuil not as having a bunch of words to choose from, but instead as a sort

of Chipotle burrito line where, when you need a word, you go to a bunch of stations and

slowly add sounds—called phonemes—that each have specific meanings, to build a word

that means exactly what you need it to.

By the way, Ithkuil includes weird phonemes like xh and q, which I definitely just said

wrong.

This chart is the key to understanding Ithkuil—it lays out the fifteen stations you stop at

to add phonemes and build your word, although we're only going to focus on the six that

are required.

You start with the root, which gives your word's base meaning.

There are about 3600 roots, which group together related words.

For example, all words that describe any type of want—desire, crave, need—come from

the root b.

For explaining purposes, let's say we want a word that will describe how I felt writing

this video: we'd start with KŠ, meaning fool or clown—the S-with-a-hat isn't actually

pronounced that way, but the guide says it's, “a voiceless non-labialized lamino-postalveolar

dorso-palatal grooved sibilant fricative,” which doesn't really help me a whole lot.

Now, each root has 18 stems that are more nuanced versions of the word, split into formal

and informal, then three patterns, with three meanings each.

So for fool/clown, let's look at our options, and hmm, let's go with nerd/dweeb, and why

not put it in the context of pathetic.

That's informal, and the third meaning of the third pattern, but then we also have to

add one of four functions.

All Ithkuil nouns are stative, but just if you're curious, if it were a verb, function

would help us understand the relationship the verb has to its noun participants, which

is best understood through these examples that we don't have time to explain.

So, third pattern, third stem, stative, okay, that means we need o- before it.

So far, our word is OKŠ.

Now we move to case: the part the noun is playing in our sentence.

English has three cases: subjective, possessive, objective.

Ithkuil has, you guessed it, 96, which serve to add nuance.

Let's say that our intended sentence is “the dweeb got a headache from trying to

figure out all this nonsense.”

In that case, I would use the inducive case, which can indicate not only that the dweeb

is the subject, but also that the dweeb is both the agent causing the action, and the

patient being impacted.

Inducive is marked by -u-, so now our word is OKŠU.

Now we get to probably the most complicated part: one single phenome will describe five

different things: essence, extension, configuration, affiliation, and perspective—the last three

of which have no equivalent in any other language.

Let's start with configuration: there are nine options, which express how many things

our word describes.

Now, I've been talking about one dweeb, which would be the uniplex, but actually this

video was made by a whole team of dweebs—so let's actually use the aggregative configuration,

which describes an associated group or set of non-identical entities.

Next, affiliation: what's the relationship of us dweebs?

There are four options, but let's go with the coalescent: that means we're associated

with each other, but all have different roles, but towards a common goal.

Now let's talk perspective: basically, it's like number—plural or singular—plus tense,

except obnoxious.

There are four options, but we're going with the mondaic, which means that it can

be understood as existing as an accessible bounded entity—unlike, say, the abstract,

which would be like the idea of dweebs, generally.

Then, there are two options for essence: is it an actual thing, or a hypothetical representation

of a thing?

In this case, us dweebs are real.

And finally, there are six extensions.

Extension requires these fully insane drawings to fully explain, but basically it tells you

what part of the thing we're talking about: the beginning, a section, the whole, so on.

We're taking about the whole group of dweebs, so that's the “delimitate.”

And now, we use this inhumanly long set of charts to figure out what letter to add.

Essence: Normal.

Extension: Delimitate.

Perspective: Mondaic.

Affiliation: Coalescent.

Configuration: Aggregative.

That means we add rn.

Which means our word is OKŠURN!

Now we just gotta figure out two more details.

First, tone.

There are seven different tones, which for verbs lets us know version: if an action is

goal or result-oriented, and whether it was successful—for example, a successful attempt

would go rising-falling, unsuccessful would go low tone.

But our word is a noun, which defaults to a falling tone.

Finally, which syllable should be stressed?

That will indicate whether that earlier sound, the o that said third stem, third pattern—pathetic

dweeb, not laughingstock—was operating in the formal or informal side of the chart.

This will also indicate if an event is being used to frame another event—like, in the

sentence “I wrote the video while everyone else had fun,” the clause “everyone else

having fun” would be framing my writing.

But we aren't doing that, so it's unframed and informal, which means I must stress the

final syllable.

And now, we can finally say our word: OKŠURN, “the entirety of a non-hypothetical, physically

accessible group of various pathetic dweebs working towards some common goal, who cause

themselves to experience something.”

You know what else is group of various dweebs working towards a common goal: me and my friends

who started Nebula, the streaming site with content from your favorite educational-ish

creators, including a bunch of stuff that the Wendover OKŠURN made: the HAI bricks

special, a three-part trivia show, three Wendover Original documentaries, my podcast Showmakers

with Brian from Real Engineering, and ad-free and often extended versions of all my regular

YouTube videos.

Plus, with the bundle, you'll also get access to CuriosityStream's thousands of top-quality

documentaries, including a bunch of great ones on linguistics, like The Grammar of Happiness.

You can get access to both for the rather insane sale price of just over a dollar a

month by going to curiositystream.com/HAI—and when you do, you'll be helping support independent

creators like us.