Hi all,
For almost 10 years I've been pretty much devoting my life to contemplating about the future in many ways and working it out in experiments (mostly artificial intelligence, transportation, resources and housing). One of them is a potential future language; no name yet. I've been working on it for a while, but it's still very much in the initial design phase. I do believe something like this will be used before switching to brain-enhanced telepathic communication, or quite possibly to improve communication between enhanced and unenhanced human beings.
I'd like to poll the general reaction and perhaps get some constructive feedback and ideas, or links to similar work/forums. Since it doesn't fully use Unicode I made a script to draw the characters and develop a dictionary; it's being constantly modified and is not in a useful stage at this point; so no examples yet, sorry.
It is heavily influenced by Mandarin, Ithkuil, Esperanto, Ancient Egyptian and my own machine language/knowledge representation designed for AI.
The features:
- Idea is to make word definitions efficient enough to be used as words themselves.
- Non-ambiguous, but should still be fairly natural.
- Hierarchical/categorical semantics (like the infamous language Ro, but more logical).
- Based on primary perception (phenomona), including "gestalt" experience (such as logic).
- Mnemonic alphabet (radicals), simplified to be just recognizable.
- It would not be acceptable to introduce today, but it's designed to fulfill a plausible future need for more efficient and concise communication.
The rules:
- Each character is a definition vertically composed of 3 radicals.
- One or more characters form a word, separated by space.
- Most characters have a simple meaning and are straightforward to combine with others, but special ones can have a grammatical meaning (comparable to pre-/postfixes etc.).
- Each expression matches exactly one meaning (but can be general or metaphorical).
- It's still possible to have one meaning definable by multiple words, since concepts can be referred to by different identifying aspects, e.g. an apple can be referred to by it's visual aspects or its biological origin (there wouldn't be a name like 'apple', just the definition).
- There are a dozen simplified radicals (each 1-2 simple strokes): sun, hand, mountain/roof, mouth, eye, center, raindrops, sea horizon, horse, tree, axe/hammer, bird.
- Radicals have no strict definition but are intended as mnemonics.
- Each radical represents fairly exclusive aspects (e.g. sun = heat, light, time, celestial, orbit/rotation), and together they cover a wide range of potential meaning.
- The top radical is the main category; related to direct sensations and directly observed "gestalts"/logic in the world (e.g. time, relative location, emotion, tactile sensation, physical function, etc.).
- The middle radical is a major concept, defined separately per category (e.g. 12 major concepts related to time). The radical "center" (= essence) represents the meaning of the category itself.
- More specific meanings are most likely formed using metaphors, representing an obvious function/aspect shared with the other domain. (Perhaps this might introduce ambiguity after all, I'm not sure yet).
- The bottom radical represents the mode of the character's meaning (e.g. agent, patient, quantification, etc.).
- The middle radical can have an apostrophe next to it to refer to the inverse/complementary meaning (e.g. bright - dark).
- In total there are 3456 primary definitions possible.
- Sentences (left-to-right) consist of 3 words or (recursive) subsentences: agent, action/aspect, patient.
- Sentences are separated by a vertical line for extra clarity.
- The parts of a subsentence are linked graphically by an underline. I might choose to just indicate the start of a subsentence though, since the length is derivable (but this might not be obvious/natural enough).
- Phonetically, sentences and subsentences are marked by tonal variations (not yet sure what exact form this will take).
- The depth of subsentences will most likely be limited, similar to English; deeper subsentences will have to be defined before/after the sentence, and referred to using a single word in the sentence.
- Each radical represents a unique vowel and consonant; one of those is used, depending on their position in the character.
- The bottom radical might be represented as a tonal variation; I'm not sure yet.
(If anyone is interested in future/moneyless/fossil fuel free living, check my blog http://howtoliveinthefuture.wordpress.com)
"Conspect" - experimental language of the future
"Conspect" - experimental language of the future
Last edited by frankvl on Thu Oct 24, 2013 12:31 am, edited 2 times in total.
Re: Experimental language of the future
This sounds great, I can't wait to see more!
Re: Experimental language of the future
Glyphs of the radicals so far:
sun - mouth - raindrops - tree
hand - eye - sea horizon - axe (needs to be horizontally flipped to distinguish from eye)
mountain/roof - center/heart - horse - bird
Again, they are mnemonics; someone fluent in this language would recognize the whole character (or even word) at once. That's the theory anyway.
sun - mouth - raindrops - tree
hand - eye - sea horizon - axe (needs to be horizontally flipped to distinguish from eye)
mountain/roof - center/heart - horse - bird
Again, they are mnemonics; someone fluent in this language would recognize the whole character (or even word) at once. That's the theory anyway.
Re: Experimental language of the future
This is where I'm working on the vocabulary (for now): https://docs.zoho.com/sheet/published.d ... e2dda508d2
You're very welcome to discuss it; let me know if you want write access for serious contributions/annotations (it's version controlled).
The working name is Conspect - concise aspectual language.
You're very welcome to discuss it; let me know if you want write access for serious contributions/annotations (it's version controlled).
The working name is Conspect - concise aspectual language.
-
ObsequiousNewt
- Avisaru
- Posts: 434
- Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 5:05 pm
- Location: /ˈaɪ̯əwʌ/
Re: Experimental language of the future
I like it... especially since cōnspectus is Latin for "watched, noticed, visible, noteworthy".frankvl wrote:This is where I'm working on the vocabulary (for now): https://docs.zoho.com/sheet/published.d ... e2dda508d2
You're very welcome to discuss it; let me know if you want write access for serious contributions/annotations (it's version controlled).
The working name is Conspect - concise aspectual language.
퇎
Ο ορανς τα ανα̨ριθομον ϝερρον εͱεν ανθροποτροφον.
Το̨ ανθροπς αυ̨τ εκψον επ αθο̨ οραναμο̨ϝον.
Θαιν. Θαιν. Θαιν. Θαιν. Θαιν. Θαιν. Θαιν.
Ο ορανς τα ανα̨ριθομον ϝερρον εͱεν ανθροποτροφον.
Το̨ ανθροπς αυ̨τ εκψον επ αθο̨ οραναμο̨ϝον.
Θαιν. Θαιν. Θαιν. Θαιν. Θαιν. Θαιν. Θαιν.
Re: "Conspect" - experimental language of the future
I decided to further simplify the radicals into a shorthand kind of script; this image shows the 12 radicals combined with each other one (open image in new tab to see the whole thing):
I like the elegance and how many of these combinations resemble latin characters; should make adoption a lot easier. There is some flexibility in how it can be written; for instance I made certain parts smaller or at an angle to be able to write it quicker and more natural; this will eventually happen anyway. In the end everything has to stay recognizable and distinguishable.
Generally, each radical starts at the top left of its designated area, then its stroke goes to the right and back to the bottom left where the next one can be started. Some radicals are not connected to the next/previous one in all cases.
This is how they are graphically defined now:
center: horizontal line crossed with slanted line
sun: big circle or (when continued into other radical) semi-circle (start of the stroke curling toward the inside)
eye: small circle
axe: small triangle
hand: like a tall U rotated 90 degrees. The horizontal lines should be long, unless it's no issue to leave them out and just have the curl.
mountain/roof: > shape
bird: long slanted line / (in some cases it cannot be connected to the previous one, to avoid confusion)
tree: a curl, like a slanted phi character.
mouth: horizontally flipped version of hand (but in this case, the lines are only long when really necessary)
sea horizon: horizontal line
rain: small // strokes, but when possible merged into the previous/next radical (so it simply becomes a parallel spacing between the top and bottom radical).
horse: ~ shape
I'm not yet sure whether and how I should use a third glyph; it might make learning the characters a lot more difficult. I might just reduce it to accents (like I do for inverse and plural). Also, I don't want to use much tone techniques like I first imagined, because it would be difficult to sing. They would most likely just be vowels like the middle radical.
I've started translating a short story to further refine the language on the go. Of course it's very time intense to translate this from English (or thoughts) as a fair amount of information has to be made explicit and reduced to a concise definition. In the end, when people practice the language, the characters and words should be instantly recognized by the brain, like you would learn any language. No analysis would be needed anymore (and irregularities will eventually infiltrate as a result, but that's how languages go). This is what should solve the problem inherent in other concise languages like Ithkuil.
I like the elegance and how many of these combinations resemble latin characters; should make adoption a lot easier. There is some flexibility in how it can be written; for instance I made certain parts smaller or at an angle to be able to write it quicker and more natural; this will eventually happen anyway. In the end everything has to stay recognizable and distinguishable.
Generally, each radical starts at the top left of its designated area, then its stroke goes to the right and back to the bottom left where the next one can be started. Some radicals are not connected to the next/previous one in all cases.
This is how they are graphically defined now:
center: horizontal line crossed with slanted line
sun: big circle or (when continued into other radical) semi-circle (start of the stroke curling toward the inside)
eye: small circle
axe: small triangle
hand: like a tall U rotated 90 degrees. The horizontal lines should be long, unless it's no issue to leave them out and just have the curl.
mountain/roof: > shape
bird: long slanted line / (in some cases it cannot be connected to the previous one, to avoid confusion)
tree: a curl, like a slanted phi character.
mouth: horizontally flipped version of hand (but in this case, the lines are only long when really necessary)
sea horizon: horizontal line
rain: small // strokes, but when possible merged into the previous/next radical (so it simply becomes a parallel spacing between the top and bottom radical).
horse: ~ shape
I'm not yet sure whether and how I should use a third glyph; it might make learning the characters a lot more difficult. I might just reduce it to accents (like I do for inverse and plural). Also, I don't want to use much tone techniques like I first imagined, because it would be difficult to sing. They would most likely just be vowels like the middle radical.
I've started translating a short story to further refine the language on the go. Of course it's very time intense to translate this from English (or thoughts) as a fair amount of information has to be made explicit and reduced to a concise definition. In the end, when people practice the language, the characters and words should be instantly recognized by the brain, like you would learn any language. No analysis would be needed anymore (and irregularities will eventually infiltrate as a result, but that's how languages go). This is what should solve the problem inherent in other concise languages like Ithkuil.