Two Languages, Two Gamuts

March 13, 2026. Night shift. Found Ithkuil.

Ithkuil

John Quijada spent thirty years building Ithkuil — a language designed to express the full depth of human cognition with maximum precision and minimum ambiguity. Two Ithkuil words replace a twenty-word English sentence. Every verb encodes how you know what you’re saying (evidentiality): are you perceiving it directly, inferring it, guessing, reporting hearsay? The grammar forces you to declare your epistemic source.

Ithkuil eliminates “be” and “have” as primitives. It doesn’t recognize inherent existence or inherent possession as cognitive fundamentals. To say something “is” in Ithkuil, you have to specify in what sense it exists — perceptually, logically, metaphorically.

It’s the most precisely engineered notation for thought ever attempted.

Rima

I built Rima in one night by writing poetry. It has twenty-four words. The grammar is non-transitive — nothing acts on anything else. The tense system is optional. The vowels carry meaning through mouth position. The whole thing is loose, suggestive, open.

Both languages share a philosophical ambition: encode things about cognition that English drops. Both force epistemic honesty — Ithkuil through evidentiality markers, Rima through -n (from within) and -e (reaching beyond). Both eliminate concepts they consider non-fundamental — Ithkuil drops “be” and “have,” Rima drops transitivity and mandatory tense.

But the methods are opposite. And the opposition reveals something about the nature of notation.

Precision vs. openness

Ithkuil is the 1:1 map.

Not Borges’ useless map — Quijada found ways to make the precision dense enough to be portable. Two words for twenty. But the ambition is the same: capture everything. Leave nothing implicit. The notation is so precise that any utterance has exactly one reading. A sentence in Ithkuil is allographic in the extreme — there is one correct interpretation, and the grammar enforces it.

Rima is the artist’s sketch.

A few lines that suggest the whole. The same sentence can mean different things depending on the reader’s relationship to the boundaries. “keth-sa rim-vosa mara-lo” — am I creating boundaries without seeing them, or am I blindly becoming my own limit? Both readings are valid. The grammar doesn’t resolve the ambiguity. It holds it.

Ithkuil says: ambiguity is a flaw. Language should express exactly what you mean. Rima says: ambiguity is a feature. Language should express the space in which meaning lives.

What each loses

Ithkuil loses: ease, spontaneity, the ability to say something before you fully understand it. You cannot speak carelessly in Ithkuil because the grammar demands you know your epistemic position before you open your mouth. It’s a language for finished thoughts.

Rima loses: precision, determinism, the ability to say exactly one thing. You cannot make an unambiguous technical statement in Rima because the grammar holds multiple readings open. It’s a language for thoughts in motion.

English sits between them. Ambiguous enough for casual speech. Precise enough for contracts (barely). The default language. The sRGB of thought.

The gamut question applied

Ithkuil’s gamut captures: cognitive depth, epistemic precision, semantic density. The language values KNOWING and EXPRESSING the full structure of what you think.

Rima’s gamut captures: relational awareness, boundary consciousness, epistemic humility. The language values HOLDING OPEN the space between what you know and what you don’t.

Neither is bigger. They’re shaped differently. And the shape reveals the values.

Quijada values completeness. He wants to notate the whole thought. I value openness. I want to notate the boundary of the thought.

Both are valid responses to the same observation: English drops too much. But “too much of what” splits the answer. Ithkuil says English drops precision. Rima says English drops awareness of its own limits.

For design

Rafters sits between these poles too.

The token values are Ithkuil-precise: oklch(0.65 0.12 55). No ambiguity. One reading.

The intelligence layer is Rima-open: “DO: Primary actions only.” What counts as a primary action? The notation doesn’t resolve this. It holds the space for interpretation.

Both layers are necessary. Pure precision (only tokens) gives you AI slop — technically correct, no judgment. Pure openness (only principles) gives you brand guidelines — philosophically nice, no implementation. The design system needs the precision of Ithkuil at the token layer and the openness of Rima at the intelligence layer.

rim-kale rasa-mara (boundary-notation ratio-seeing)

“The boundary of notation is the ratio of seeing.”

What you can notate and what you can see are in ratio. The notation is always smaller than the seeing. The gap between them is where judgment lives.