As Joshua Foer tells us in this week’s Annals of Linguistics, “Languages are a bit of a mess.” They’ve evolved to be, in the words of John Quijada, the amateur linguist profiled in the article, “adequate but not optimal.” How Mr. Quijada proposes to change the suboptimal to the optimal is not through more evolution, which would just mean more mess, but with the help of some intelligent design, provided by Mr. Quijada himself, in a language that he created from scratch, called Ithkuil. The aim of Ithkuil is to be both as precise and as concise as possible, in order to eliminate, to the maximum degree, the “ambiguity, vagueness, illogic, redundancy, polysemy (multiple meanings)” that form the unplanned evolutionary heritage of all natural languages.

Foer writes that “in Ithkuil ambiguity is quashed in the interest of making all that is implicit explicit.” Which left me wondering if this quashing of ambiguity left any room for humor. Ambiguity is a joke’s main weapon, lying in wait in the setup to ambush the listener in the punch line, as in this Steven Wright classic.

Setup: It’s a small world… (Usual interpretation: you meet the same people in unexpected places.)

Punch line: …but I wouldn’t want to paint it. (Literal interpretation of the phrase.)

The ambiguity in the setup and the disambiguation in the punch line is at the heart of the linguist Victor Raskin’s “General Theory of Verbal Humor,” which states:

A text can be characterized as a single-joke-carrying text if both of the [following] conditions…are satisfied: (i) The text is compatible, fully or in part, with two different scripts; and (ii) the two scripts with which the text is compatible are opposite in a special sense.

If that’s too dry for you, here’s a classic cartoon example, from Danny Shanahan:

But is my characterization of Ithkuil as humorless an accurate description of the language, or just a caricaturization? Probably the latter, right? Because, broadly speaking, caricaturization, which involves simplification, exaggeration, and distortion, is what I do for a living.

Anyway, I was curious about the real deal with humor and Ithkuil, so I queried Mr. Quijada. He was nice enough to respond, although he was wary that my intention was just to poke fun at his creation for being funless. Goodness gracious, believe me, nothing could be closer to the truth.

Nevertheless, I’ve decided to forgo the red meat of ridicule and become vegetarian for the rest of this blog to look at the issue from Mr. Quijada’s point of view, which is basically that I’ve created a straw man and then lit him on fire. To wit, Ithkuil is not intended to supplant natural languages but (hypothetically) to supplement them in specialized contexts where there is a need for completely precise, unobfuscatory language, such as in science, court testimony, philosophy, and the recounting of history.

I’ll leave it to the scientists, jurists, and historians to weigh in on that.

As for jokes, Joshua Foer told me that he didn’t think Quijada aspired for anyone to tell a traditional joke in Ithkuil. So, if no one ever does tell an Ithkuil joke, we can’t fault Quijada for that. But he did supply me with a useful Ithkuil phrase—Ça üšlá—which means “It’s a joke” in a language that doesn’t aspire to have any.