hypothetical ithkuil 5 community ideas

What features would you all like to see implemented if the community hypothetically were to create a new version of Ithkuil?

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Personally, I would like a return to a more Ithkuil 3–size root space. New Ithkuil's root space is much too large, I feel, and a lot of distinctions that could easily be relegated to affixes, like the crime roots and likely the household fixture roots, were instead canonized as roots in their own right, causing the lexicon to be bloated with trivially-derivable concepts.

To assist in this, I would also like the roots to have a variable number of stems. Ithkuil 3 admitted that more stems are needed for some roots with the SSD affix, and on the flip-side New Ithkuil tries too hard to make every root fit the three-stem format even when doing so would be impractical ("state/act of doing without, being deprived of, or being unable to utilize an outdoor swimming pool"). Allowing roots to have a flexible number of stems would allow them to cover more semantic ground without necessarily compromising on specificity, while avoiding awkward and niche stems.

Finally, Specification is a good idea in principle, and it works really well in some situations, but its implementation leaves a lot to be desired. I would really like to see mklcp's Hyper implemented, which keeps all the upsides of Specification while solving or sidestepping its quirks.

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I definitely agree about variable stems. I've always used this idea in my personal Ithkuil-inspired mini conlangs and I think it'd be a great addition. I also find that mklcp's Hyper makes much sense.

not an Ithkuilist, but my IRL who is was telling me about a situation where Quijada just straight-up didn't specify how to integrate numbers into the script (like, how to attach affixes etc.) I think there are some other situations left unspecified as well? so I'd hope those would be rectified

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