Instead, he wanted the language for more elaborate and profound fields where more insightful thoughts are expected, such as philosophy, arts, science, and politics.

[2] For example, the two-word Ithkuil sentence "Tram-mļöi hhâsmařpţuktôx" can be translated into English as "On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point.

"[2] Quijada deems his creation as too complex to have developed naturally, seeing it as an exercise in exploring how languages could function.

[12] Since July 2015, Quijada has released several Ithkuil songs in a prog-rock style as part of the album Kaduatán, which translates to "Wayfarers.

John Quijada [id] was born around 1959 in Los Angeles, United States to a Mexican-American immigrant couple.

[15] Quijada's interest in conlanging began when he was introduced to the utopian politics of the Esperanto group as well as some books from a record store near his home.

In addition, Quijada also made annual visits to Cody's Books, a legendary bookstore in Berkeley, California to find new reads.

Ithkuil was heavily inspired by cognitive linguists including George Lakoff, Ronald Langacker, Gilles Fauconnier, and Len Talmy.

Quijada remade Ithkuil's morphophonology with 30 consonants and 10 vowels (and the addition of tones) and published the revision on 10 June 2007 as Ilaksh.

Diversely shaped, shaded and superimposed cartouches represent the syntactic relations of the verb and noun phrases of a sentence.

These density conventions also allowed the formal system to be inexpensively printed in black-and-white, or inscribed or imprinted on stone or other materials.

The script uses a unique morphophonemic principle that allows sentences representing grammatical categories to be pronounced in multiple ways as the speaker sees fit.

Quijada plans to adopt the cartouche script "for use as an alternative, 'ornamental' writing system for artistic purposes" to Ithkuil in a future update of the language.

Owing to complaints about the difficult patterns in the language morphology, on 30 October 2017 Quijada published a tentative outline for a new version of the language, addressing learners' desires for a more agglutinative morphophonology, including a restructured formative outline, and extended use of Adjuncts for shortened expression of the grammar to further create phonaesthetics.

Quijada has considered mandating verbal categories expressed in formatives to be redundantly spoken aloud in adjuncts to be more naturalistic.

In February 2023, Quijada published the fourth iteration of the language, titled New Ithkuil, and announced that the previous version would remain online for archival purposes.

The letters i and u are marked with a grave diacritic when they are unstressed and the first of more than one vowel after a consonant to remind the reader that they are pronounced [iː] and [u] and not [j] nor [w], respectively.

The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis would suggest that, Ithkuil being an extremely precise and synthetic language, its speakers would have a more discerning, deeper understanding both of everyday situations and of broader phenomena, and of abstract philosophical categories.

[26] Moreover, in line with this, Quijada has stated he does not believe a speaker would think necessarily any faster because even though Ithkuil is terse, a single word requires a lot more thought before it can be spoken than it would in a natural language.

[15] Kozlovsky also likened Ithkuil to the fictional Speedtalk from Robert A. Heinlein's novella Gulf, and contrasted both languages with the Newspeak of the communicationally restricted society of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Two types of verbal adjuncts were inflected to indicate 14 valencies, 6 versions, 8 formats, 37 derivations, 30 modalities, 4 levels, 9 validations, 9 phases, 9 sanctions, 32 aspects, 8 moods, and 24 biases.

In an effort to make the language more speakable, Quijada created a revision called Ilaksh that relied on tone to reduce the phonemic inventory.

[28] Adjuncts serve two roles, either indicating personal referents like pronouns, or specifying additional verbal information such as grammatical bias.

[28] Two examples are given in the tables below: All Ithkuil formatives, whether functioning as nouns or verbs, inflect for various grammatical categories that are quite dissimilar from any of those in natural languages.

[30] Quantization is more or less covered by the grammatical categories of Configuration, Affiliation, and Perspective, even though these do not technically refer to number per se.

The six extensions (Delimitive, Proximal, Inceptive, Terminative, Graduative, Depletive) describe the referred part of a set, e.g. its beginning or its end.

These are listed below:[32] The four functions describe the general relationship that the verbal formative has with its nominal participants (state, action, description).

On 27 March 2015, Quijada released a mathematical sublanguage using a dozenal number system which uses the circle constant tau.

Its use is closely tied to Ithkuil's grammatical system, which allows much of the phonological aspect of words to be morpho-syntactically inferred.

[37] The cartouche in the Ilaksh writing system consists of four different colors (black, white, gray, shaded or striped) and each of them contains 30 side shapes.