9 ms·

Unker Non-Linear Writing System

148 points by strogonoff 6y ago

skoodge 6y ago
What a fascinating concept, especially this part: > We have only started to develop how to hold a conversation in UNLWS itself. As we currently have it, it's a very, very different kind of thing than linear atomic turntaking. Rather, it's a sort of ongoing mutual edit of a shared structure, where revision history playback (or live observation) expresses the 'conversational' tone expected by linear conversation, and the fixed form expresses the integrated totality of what the participants have expressed. Different ink colors help to distinguish participants, but there are no boundaries preventing one participant from using another's ink as part of their own expressions. Indeed, there are a few special conversational variants of glyphs which are meant to be easier to drop in to an already-drawn passage than the normal forms; these are recognizable by their use of two ink colors. (It’s a pity that it’s so fiddly to edit pencil or pen drawings.) I can't help but wonder how this would look like applied to instant messaging: We are used to seeing our conversations arranged in differently colored bubbles, but how would our form of communication change if we instead communicated on a collaborative surface where we could freely choose which color to use and where to add our thoughts? (Similar to how Slack already introduces a small amount of non-linearity in the form of threaded conversations, but applied on a much larger scale, so that non-linear collaborative communication becomes the default instead of an afterthought.)
- joesavage 6y ago
  It's definitely an interesting thought. Max Krieger also explores this at some length in "Chatting with Glue": https://a9.io/glue-comic/ https://a9.io/glue-comic/
  - skoodge 6y ago
    Thanks, that comic looks fantastic! Any idea where else these ideas are explored nowadays? I've seen that there are references to related projects mentioned at the end, but so far I had the impression that any research around hypertext (understood broadly) has pretty much fallen out of fashion in academia (and it sure doesn't help that hypertext is usually associated with the specific implementation of the modern web). Lately there has been a lot of buzz around bidirectional outliners / note taking apps like Roam and Obsidian, so it seems that there is some interest. But somewhat ironically, all the more research oriented attempts that I could find seem to be scattered around the web without any kind of cohesive community. (Of course there are still a lot of unexplored ideas dating back to Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more modern hypertext research seems comparatively hard to find.)
    - joesavage 6y ago
      Glad you found it interesting! Personally, I get a lot of interesting information around these kinds of topics from Twitter. In addition to @maxkriegers, the author of that comic, I think you might find some value in checking out users like @andy_matuschak, @rsnous, @geoffreylitt, @yoshiki, and @elzr, as well as the broader communities that surround them.
- karl-j 6y ago
  I took note of that part too, it reminds me of this article [1] posted on HN recently. It contrasts the fleeting and context dependent flows of posts on social media ("the stream") with enduring wiki style interlinking of posts where the context is embedded in the linking ("the garden"). It consider it in the context of personal note taking, and I feel what you mention is the garden approach to conversation, as opposed to the normal stream approach. I wonder what the medium would have to be like to be useful for instant messaging, since not all things being said need to endure or benefit from linking. Maybe the ink fades unless new things are written nearby, proving its relevance? [1] https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/ https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-te...
  - strogonoff 6y ago
    Perhaps well-implemented collaborative sketching could be the medium that turns conversations from streams into gardens (and it’s the only way of chatting in UNLWS I can imagine). Some of the challenges I see: — Tracking where the conversation is being advanced, since it can happen at any place in the sketch. — Sketching, while can be more informative than text, is tricker to conform to smaller mobile screen sizes. — Ideally it should not be limited to two dimensions only, but multi-dimensional sketching poses hard UI challenges.
    - saizai 6y ago
      Tracking: if you're asking a question or otherwise anticipating where the other will add, there are relatively few places to look. Also, we use different colors per author in multi-author utterances, which makes it easy to spot another's writing. Of course, unless you have an animated or history-preserving medium (which we assume we don't), then reconstructing the order of conversation might be difficult. That is entirely in keeping with our sense of what is "natural" to a non-linear language. The order in which something was written is temporal, and everything temporal is linear, so it's disfavored semantically & grammatically. We prefer to challenge concepts like "conversation" at the root on such issues, rather than try to adapt UNLWS to afford them. Sketching: we assume an infinite plane writing canvas. In practice, this means eg that one can use scaling to fit anything anywhere. However, we generally do not make use of images, unless it's purely quotative. We do have e.g. graphs grammaticalized, though (inspired by Tufte's sparklines, but with a few more affordances from not being in a linear embedding.) 3d+: We considered that early on — and it's addressed in my essays on language design — but we rejected it as too under-constrained and difficult to work with in practice. However, I've recently been thinking about a UNLWS-ish tactile 2.5D concept, which would use texture and a shallow height dimension — like a topographic map, not like an ants' nest. That's still in early conceptual stage, and not documented anywhere except a couple posts on CONLANG-L.
- eterps 6y ago
  As this seems to mediate consensus building, this also reminds me of: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/we-will-see-the-rise-of-civic-hackers https://www.wired.co.uk/article/we-will-see-the-rise-of-civi... https://www.wired.co.uk/article/taiwan-democracy-social-media https://www.wired.co.uk/article/taiwan-democracy-social-medi... Especially having a global social media network with linear discussion maxed on 280 characters seems to be one of the most efficient ways to reach disagreement.
  - saizai 6y ago
    Interesting. I've long been interested in ways to make systems more pro-social, but I hadn't previously thought of UNLWS in that context. Thank you for giving me a new idea to mull.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  > I can't help but wonder how this would look like applied to instant messaging: We are used to seeing our conversations arranged in differently colored bubbles, but how would our form of communication change if we instead communicated on a collaborative surface where we could freely choose which color to use and where to add our thoughts? Sounds a lot like Google Docs. Maybe all this time that Google has been struggling to develop the killer chat app, they were sitting one the ultimate one this whole time.
  - saizai 6y ago
    You're describing Google Wave¹, which (sadly) was killed as unsuccessful. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave
    - eterps 6y ago
      Still wondering whether it was unsuccessful as a product or as a concept.
      - saizai 6y ago
        Can we even distinguish those in practice? AFAICT its main problem was being so general-purpose that it was hard to describe as a compelling use case. Of course, I also don't subscribe to the belief that the popularity or memetic prowess of an idea defines its "success" except commercially. I thought it was a very nifty thing. To me, that counts as a success. Alas, that is not the metric used by companies. :p
- saizai 6y ago
  See also Ouwi¹ by Schuyler Duveen, which is one of the very few other non-linear written languages. It takes a somewhat different approach, and (IIRC) has some examples of conversational output. (Ouwi & UNLWS were developed without either of us knowing about the other, though we got to know each other later on.) ¹ https://ouwi.org https://ouwi.org
- saizai 6y ago
  I believe that *Pad¹ does what you describe. In multi-user mode, it has an option to show each contributor's writing in a separate color. (I'm not sure if one can pick the color, though.) ¹ eg https://cryptpad.piratenpartei.de/pad/ https://cryptpad.piratenpartei.de/pad/
chronikewok 6y ago
This reminds me of the film Arrival and relates to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis [1]regarding how language affects our perception and cognition. It's certainly a very interesting design (there's a hieroglyphic electrical circuit quality to it), but it wasn't clear what we can infer or gain from this non-linear form of writing. I feel like non-linear thinking is naturally how our brains work (or has more potential to work), but not how we have been trained to decode symbols, so it'd be interesting to see how this type of language might alter our cognition. Would this help us look at ideas more holistically? Would this help us be more sensitive to relationships rather than just the objects? Could this open up new patterns of thinking? Lot's of interesting questions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
- ooobit2 6y ago
  I believe that understanding relationships between units (objects, people, etc.) explains high intelligence, especially in autism, more than most average thinkers assume. People tend to fixate on the unit, and presume a relationship apropos between units. So, if we give core focus to memorizing the relationship then the unit, we may actually reinforce the neural pathways for both units and the abstraction between them without additional repetition. My long-term memory is more efficient when I learn something from multiple angles. So, I don't look at basic algebra and just think, "X and Y are placeholders for numbers." I also think, "X can contain the value Y expressed as X=!Y." and "X can be a function of X expressed as X=X(X++)." and so on. This kind of ad-hoc modeling is about testing and defining the context of a relationship between units. And in that respect, I can say, anecdotally, that I consume information quickly and rarely have recall errors.
  - saeranv 6y ago
    Fascinating. Can you explain this: "X can be a function of X expressed as X=X(X++)." This is my (incorrect) attempt to make sense of the equation: X++ = X + 1 (?) X() What does this mean? How can X be a function?
- saizai 6y ago
  Part of the inspiration for UNLWS was Heptapod B from Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life, from which Arrival was made. See also my essays Non-Linear Fully Two-Dimensional Writing System Design ¹ and On the design of an ideal language ², which I wrote before we started to make UNLWS. The written "language" in Arrival is purely babble (though it has some nice aesthetics at the fine level). It also violates explicit features described in the story, e.g. that an utterance is composed of unbroken strokes (i.e. a connected graph). FWIW, I asked Chiang years ago whether he had any actual implementation or visualization in mind for Heptapod B. He didn't; it was purely an abstract set of properties for him. ¹ https://s.ai/essays/nlf2dws https://s.ai/essays/nlf2dws ² https://s.ai/essays/on_the_design_of_an_ideal_language https://s.ai/essays/on_the_design_of_an_ideal_language
ShorsHammer 6y ago
Completely Offtopic: How does one get a single letter domain name? Especially with a premium tld, and even moreso for a personal blog it just seems unreal.
- kbr2000 6y ago
  I guess like any other second-level domainname: Fetch your piggy bank, and then go out to look for it. Peculiar things that pop in my mind right now: - given their length, know that they are scarce; you can expect that scarcity to drive the price - some TLDs might have a minimum length for subdomains that are available to the public - expect a lot of them already registered since longtime, or reserved by various individuals or organizations [0]; intuitively, the chance of those getting released soon feels slim You can use DNS (check the dig [1] utility), in combination with WHOIS if you want to gather information. Or a website of a domain registrar like [2]. Keep in mind that you might be watched doing that, information that could be used to drive up the price again. Or, if you really have good ideas, you convince one of the current registrants to use his domain (guessing here that a lot of those domains are not really in use). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_dom... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dig_(command) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dig_(command) [2] https://shop.gandi.net/en/domain/suggest?search=b.xyz https://shop.gandi.net/en/domain/suggest?search=b.xyz
- saizai 6y ago
  Anguilla permits them. I had to buy off a squatter. But Sai is literally my full name (I'm mononymous), at the time it was affordable to buy off the squatter, and the per year registration fee isn't too high. So I think it's certainly been worth it.
  - tygrak 6y ago
    That's really cool! Both being mononymous and having a one letter domain. Conlangs are also really cool! You are a pretty cool person!
    - 6y ago
foobar_ 6y ago
Programming is a non linear writing system. Now that I think of it ... if you replace functions names with logograms you get a top to down writing system of sorts.
- atennapel 6y ago
  Maybe a pure logical programming language such as MiniKanren can be seen as non-linear? There you just read in all the rules you defined and (I think) it does not matter in which order you try to match the rules when you query the system.
  - foobar_ 6y ago
    > Every glyph includes a number of binding points, one for each of its arguments, the semantic roles involved in its meaning. For instance, the glyph glossed as eat has two binding points—one for the thing consumed and one for the consumer. The glyph glossed as (be) fish has only one, the fish. Often we give glosses more like “X eat Y”, so as to give names for the binding points (X is eater, Y is eaten). Seems so ... even in logic programming we have logic glyphs. Maths is full of glyphs with connectors, especially the integral sign. <bank-glyph>->50<money-glyph> is sorta analogous to bank->withdraw(50) ... (HN seems to be removing emojis) This makes sense ... is this how chinese words operate ? Its logical and it makes sense why early languages were logogram based. In normal languages like english it seems the "connection" points are separate and split into separate words. Has anyone done research on commonly used words in code ?
    - saizai 6y ago
      UNLWS can definitely be described as being based on "predicate calculus" (as in formal logic). I personally have never felt it to be a very apt or helpful description — I think of it more in terms of Lakoff-style "frames". However, every glyph in UNLWS, including the all-pervasive minimal glyph (a dot, which is implicitly in any line), is a predicate. FWIW, no this isn't how Chinese works — and it isn't ideographic. Hanzi (& Japanese kanji) have both semantic and rhyme hinting components, and aside from a few words that are nearly minimal in their use of radicals (the components), are generally vastly underspecified to get the meaning of the grapheme unless you know it.
gardenfelder 6y ago
They have a bogus link http://eaworld.conlang.org/relays/relay19/relay19.php?ring=3&torch=04&ringlish=N&tlit=n&torchlish=y&reverse=n http://eaworld.conlang.org/relays/relay19/relay19.php?ring=3... which I am not able to decipher.
- saizai 6y ago
  Thanks for reporting the broken link. Alex has fixed it in the document. The content is now at https://000024.org/conlang/relay19/index.html https://000024.org/conlang/relay19/index.html Google "conlang relay" to learn more about the context for which this was made.
restalis 6y ago
After going through the phase of admiring this new and intellectually stimulating thing, I went on with an exercise of imagination about how it would look like for a society to have evolved somehow into using this at large. Each new word (or at least morpheme) has to have its own signature/ideogram that has to be learned and remembered. For a lexicon of any practical use that would mean thousands of ideograms. That feels quite a burden. An improved solution that I'm able to imagine just now may be to have ideograms only for abstract relations (like for prepositions) and keep "ordinary" words (as the nouns and verbs, at least) formed by a much smaller group of simpler constructs, like we do with alphabet letters? Good stuff, nevertheless.
- andrewflnr 6y ago
  Ideograms clearly can work, and pretty dang well, as demonstrated by ancient China. Some phonetic representation would be nice too. Either way, you'd likely see common structures evolving into ideograms. Very interesting.
  - saizai 6y ago
    FWIW, we deliberately decided to have no phonetic representation at all, to avoid any linearizing influence. Yes, it would need a large number of glyphs. Not so many as speculated above, though — e.g. we have one glyph that covers communicate, say, tell, hear, speech (all senses), etc. (with some mix-ins for sensory modality); another one that covers give, receive, gift, sell, etc. Linear languages with European structure need way more words, because the syntax isn't very able to represent the shared concept between these with a single word. We can. And yes, common structures do get turned into glyphs, or reduced forms. We also have a barely-explored concept about glyphs being fractal (i.e. if you zoom in, it's actually the shape of an underlying utterance whose syntax "draws" the higher order glyph). This presumably would be a sort of literary or poetic form. (I have composed one very simple example.¹) ¹ https://s.ai/poetry/distant_love https://s.ai/poetry/distant_love
    - plutonorm 6y ago
      I love this idea so much that I would like to learn the language. Is there a group or something I could join? Does anyone want to make a group? I'm sure we could work something out with an online drawing app. The possiblity of getting ideas out of my head and onto paper without having to linearise everything is very exciting.
codezero 6y ago
I love that “eat” looks like Pac-Man.
- saizai 6y ago
  Actually IIRC, that was our inspiration for it. ;)
mickdarling 6y ago
Doesn’t this just boil down to “GOTO may be useful”?
anonytrary 6y ago
Holy shit. I'm blown away by this. Imagine the ability to use these as training inputs for language processing. Just add one more representation to the bucket of things to train models on. Very fascinating. Favoriting this.
- saizai 6y ago
  Could you elaborate? How do you see this as relating to NLP? FWIW, I very strongly recommend Rick Morneau's monograph Lexical semantics of a machine translation interlingua ¹. It was a major influence for me, and is squarely intended for NLP model-internal usage. ¹ http://www.rickmor.x10.mx/lexical_semantics.html http://www.rickmor.x10.mx/lexical_semantics.html
- plutonorm 6y ago
  Yes. Also, I suspect that feature vectors would have very natural translations into this kind of language. We could see inside the black box.
KhoomeiK 6y ago
Reminds me of this [1] blog post which was on HN a while ago about Yukaghir's (a paleosiberian group) semasiographic writing system. Also related is this conlang that was posted to r/conlangs maybe a couple years ago that I can't seem to find now. The idea was that you can represent elementary ideas with shapes and then connect those shapes in a non-linear fashion and add slight variations to specify certain semantic properties, allowing there to be numerous different "correct" readings. Also, shameless plug of my blog [2] where I've been fleshing out a similar idea (albeit not focused on writing) for the past few months. It takes inspiration from Discourse Representation Theory and semantic graphs. Edit: Just read about halfway through and the similarities between your conlang and mine are striking. I'd go so far as to say that yours is just a really interesting visual representation of mine. [1] http://historyview.blogspot.com/2011/10/yukaghir-girl-writes-love-letter.html http://historyview.blogspot.com/2011/10/yukaghir-girl-writes... [2] https://rpandey.tech/blog https://rpandey.tech/blog
saizai 6y ago
I'm Sai, co-creator of UNLWS. AMA(relevant).
- brian_cloutier 6y ago
  Are you still working on it, is there a community I could join to try having a conversation using it?
  - saizai 6y ago
    Yes, we're still working on it. (E.g. we were discussing the concept "only" a couple days ago.) Right now, our main blocker is technical: we want a JavaScript based method for rendering it from a DSL, because making, loading, & maintaining images in the doc is a huge pain. We've provisionally decided on using Cytoscape.js, but it needs some extensions to work for us — e.g. cubic splines (it only has quadratic) and relative angles of attachment for edges to nodes. My areas of expertise are mainly back end web dev & analytics, and Alex's are mainly academic math & coding competitions, so JS isn't particularly easy for either of us. We'd appreciate help with this. It's on my GitHub¹; get in contact personally² if interested. As for a speaker community, we don't have one currently, though over the years we've had around 3-4 people express interest. We never really considered it something that others would want to do (though we've always been quite interested in getting feedback, suggestions, etc., and we'd be willing to engage in in-UNLWS dialogue). However, this seems like roughly the critical mass needed for such a community, so I'll try to set one up. Please contact me directly², and LMK any platform preferences. ¹ https://github.com/saizai https://github.com/saizai across a couple recent repos ² https://s.ai/contact https://s.ai/contact
  - saizai 6y ago
    I've now made a Slack for it: unlws.slack.com. Invite link: https://join.slack.com/t/ulws/shared_invite/zt-ewevpfmf-s1r3lzEX02QMgglC3ECkZw https://join.slack.com/t/ulws/shared_invite/zt-ewevpfmf-s1r3...
nathell 6y ago
Somewhat related: Sylabitsa, a Hangul-style syllabary for Polish. Described in its current rendition in [1], but previous ideas of the author included vertically stacking syllables, thus making the alphabet potentially infinite and non-linear. [1]: https://sites.google.com/site/qrczakmk/sylabitsa https://sites.google.com/site/qrczakmk/sylabitsa
pham_nuwen 6y ago
This could be utterly beautiful if fused with Dialogue Mapping: http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2009/09/10/the-practice-of-dialogue-mapping-part-1/ http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2009/09/10/the-practice-of-...
dfischer 6y ago
Interesting similarities between signals and Sumerian cuneiform. 1. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/72_Goeta_sigils.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/72_Goeta... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform#/media/File:Sumero-Akkadian_cuneiform_syllabary.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform#/media/File:Sumero-A...

148 points by strogonoff 6y ago

What a fascinating concept, especially this part: > We have only started to develop how to hold a conversation in UNLWS itself. As we currently have it, it's a very, very different kind of thing than linear atomic turntaking. Rather, it's a sort of ongoing mutual edit of a shared structure, where revision history playback (or live observation) expresses the 'conversational' tone expected by linear conversation, and the fixed form expresses the integrated totality of what the participants have expressed. Different ink colors help to distinguish participants, but there are no boundaries preventing one participant from using another's ink as part of their own expressions. Indeed, there are a few special conversational variants of glyphs which are meant to be easier to drop in to an already-drawn passage than the normal forms; these are recognizable by their use of two ink colors. (It’s a pity that it’s so fiddly to edit pencil or pen drawings.) I can't help but wonder how this would look like applied to instant messaging: We are used to seeing our conversations arranged in differently colored bubbles, but how would our form of communication change if we instead communicated on a collaborative surface where we could freely choose which color to use and where to add our thoughts? (Similar to how Slack already introduces a small amount of non-linearity in the form of threaded conversations, but applied on a much larger scale, so that non-linear collaborative communication becomes the default instead of an afterthought.)

joesavage 6y ago
It's definitely an interesting thought. Max Krieger also explores this at some length in "Chatting with Glue": https://a9.io/glue-comic/ https://a9.io/glue-comic/
- skoodge 6y ago
  Thanks, that comic looks fantastic! Any idea where else these ideas are explored nowadays? I've seen that there are references to related projects mentioned at the end, but so far I had the impression that any research around hypertext (understood broadly) has pretty much fallen out of fashion in academia (and it sure doesn't help that hypertext is usually associated with the specific implementation of the modern web). Lately there has been a lot of buzz around bidirectional outliners / note taking apps like Roam and Obsidian, so it seems that there is some interest. But somewhat ironically, all the more research oriented attempts that I could find seem to be scattered around the web without any kind of cohesive community. (Of course there are still a lot of unexplored ideas dating back to Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more modern hypertext research seems comparatively hard to find.)
  - joesavage 6y ago
    Glad you found it interesting! Personally, I get a lot of interesting information around these kinds of topics from Twitter. In addition to @maxkriegers, the author of that comic, I think you might find some value in checking out users like @andy_matuschak, @rsnous, @geoffreylitt, @yoshiki, and @elzr, as well as the broader communities that surround them.
karl-j 6y ago
I took note of that part too, it reminds me of this article [1] posted on HN recently. It contrasts the fleeting and context dependent flows of posts on social media ("the stream") with enduring wiki style interlinking of posts where the context is embedded in the linking ("the garden"). It consider it in the context of personal note taking, and I feel what you mention is the garden approach to conversation, as opposed to the normal stream approach. I wonder what the medium would have to be like to be useful for instant messaging, since not all things being said need to endure or benefit from linking. Maybe the ink fades unless new things are written nearby, proving its relevance? [1] https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/ https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-te...
- strogonoff 6y ago
  Perhaps well-implemented collaborative sketching could be the medium that turns conversations from streams into gardens (and it’s the only way of chatting in UNLWS I can imagine). Some of the challenges I see: — Tracking where the conversation is being advanced, since it can happen at any place in the sketch. — Sketching, while can be more informative than text, is tricker to conform to smaller mobile screen sizes. — Ideally it should not be limited to two dimensions only, but multi-dimensional sketching poses hard UI challenges.
  - saizai 6y ago
    Tracking: if you're asking a question or otherwise anticipating where the other will add, there are relatively few places to look. Also, we use different colors per author in multi-author utterances, which makes it easy to spot another's writing. Of course, unless you have an animated or history-preserving medium (which we assume we don't), then reconstructing the order of conversation might be difficult. That is entirely in keeping with our sense of what is "natural" to a non-linear language. The order in which something was written is temporal, and everything temporal is linear, so it's disfavored semantically & grammatically. We prefer to challenge concepts like "conversation" at the root on such issues, rather than try to adapt UNLWS to afford them. Sketching: we assume an infinite plane writing canvas. In practice, this means eg that one can use scaling to fit anything anywhere. However, we generally do not make use of images, unless it's purely quotative. We do have e.g. graphs grammaticalized, though (inspired by Tufte's sparklines, but with a few more affordances from not being in a linear embedding.) 3d+: We considered that early on — and it's addressed in my essays on language design — but we rejected it as too under-constrained and difficult to work with in practice. However, I've recently been thinking about a UNLWS-ish tactile 2.5D concept, which would use texture and a shallow height dimension — like a topographic map, not like an ants' nest. That's still in early conceptual stage, and not documented anywhere except a couple posts on CONLANG-L.
eterps 6y ago
As this seems to mediate consensus building, this also reminds me of: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/we-will-see-the-rise-of-civic-hackers https://www.wired.co.uk/article/we-will-see-the-rise-of-civi... https://www.wired.co.uk/article/taiwan-democracy-social-media https://www.wired.co.uk/article/taiwan-democracy-social-medi... Especially having a global social media network with linear discussion maxed on 280 characters seems to be one of the most efficient ways to reach disagreement.
- saizai 6y ago
  Interesting. I've long been interested in ways to make systems more pro-social, but I hadn't previously thought of UNLWS in that context. Thank you for giving me a new idea to mull.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
> I can't help but wonder how this would look like applied to instant messaging: We are used to seeing our conversations arranged in differently colored bubbles, but how would our form of communication change if we instead communicated on a collaborative surface where we could freely choose which color to use and where to add our thoughts? Sounds a lot like Google Docs. Maybe all this time that Google has been struggling to develop the killer chat app, they were sitting one the ultimate one this whole time.
- saizai 6y ago
  You're describing Google Wave¹, which (sadly) was killed as unsuccessful. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave
  - eterps 6y ago
    Still wondering whether it was unsuccessful as a product or as a concept.
    - saizai 6y ago
      Can we even distinguish those in practice? AFAICT its main problem was being so general-purpose that it was hard to describe as a compelling use case. Of course, I also don't subscribe to the belief that the popularity or memetic prowess of an idea defines its "success" except commercially. I thought it was a very nifty thing. To me, that counts as a success. Alas, that is not the metric used by companies. :p
saizai 6y ago
See also Ouwi¹ by Schuyler Duveen, which is one of the very few other non-linear written languages. It takes a somewhat different approach, and (IIRC) has some examples of conversational output. (Ouwi & UNLWS were developed without either of us knowing about the other, though we got to know each other later on.) ¹ https://ouwi.org https://ouwi.org
saizai 6y ago
I believe that *Pad¹ does what you describe. In multi-user mode, it has an option to show each contributor's writing in a separate color. (I'm not sure if one can pick the color, though.) ¹ eg https://cryptpad.piratenpartei.de/pad/ https://cryptpad.piratenpartei.de/pad/

chronikewok 6y ago

This reminds me of the film Arrival and relates to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis [1]regarding how language affects our perception and cognition. It's certainly a very interesting design (there's a hieroglyphic electrical circuit quality to it), but it wasn't clear what we can infer or gain from this non-linear form of writing. I feel like non-linear thinking is naturally how our brains work (or has more potential to work), but not how we have been trained to decode symbols, so it'd be interesting to see how this type of language might alter our cognition. Would this help us look at ideas more holistically? Would this help us be more sensitive to relationships rather than just the objects? Could this open up new patterns of thinking? Lot's of interesting questions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

ooobit2 6y ago
I believe that understanding relationships between units (objects, people, etc.) explains high intelligence, especially in autism, more than most average thinkers assume. People tend to fixate on the unit, and presume a relationship apropos between units. So, if we give core focus to memorizing the relationship then the unit, we may actually reinforce the neural pathways for both units and the abstraction between them without additional repetition. My long-term memory is more efficient when I learn something from multiple angles. So, I don't look at basic algebra and just think, "X and Y are placeholders for numbers." I also think, "X can contain the value Y expressed as X=!Y." and "X can be a function of X expressed as X=X(X++)." and so on. This kind of ad-hoc modeling is about testing and defining the context of a relationship between units. And in that respect, I can say, anecdotally, that I consume information quickly and rarely have recall errors.
- saeranv 6y ago
  Fascinating. Can you explain this: "X can be a function of X expressed as X=X(X++)." This is my (incorrect) attempt to make sense of the equation: X++ = X + 1 (?) X() What does this mean? How can X be a function?
saizai 6y ago
Part of the inspiration for UNLWS was Heptapod B from Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life, from which Arrival was made. See also my essays Non-Linear Fully Two-Dimensional Writing System Design ¹ and On the design of an ideal language ², which I wrote before we started to make UNLWS. The written "language" in Arrival is purely babble (though it has some nice aesthetics at the fine level). It also violates explicit features described in the story, e.g. that an utterance is composed of unbroken strokes (i.e. a connected graph). FWIW, I asked Chiang years ago whether he had any actual implementation or visualization in mind for Heptapod B. He didn't; it was purely an abstract set of properties for him. ¹ https://s.ai/essays/nlf2dws https://s.ai/essays/nlf2dws ² https://s.ai/essays/on_the_design_of_an_ideal_language https://s.ai/essays/on_the_design_of_an_ideal_language

ShorsHammer 6y ago

Completely Offtopic: How does one get a single letter domain name? Especially with a premium tld, and even moreso for a personal blog it just seems unreal.

kbr2000 6y ago
I guess like any other second-level domainname: Fetch your piggy bank, and then go out to look for it. Peculiar things that pop in my mind right now: - given their length, know that they are scarce; you can expect that scarcity to drive the price - some TLDs might have a minimum length for subdomains that are available to the public - expect a lot of them already registered since longtime, or reserved by various individuals or organizations [0]; intuitively, the chance of those getting released soon feels slim You can use DNS (check the dig [1] utility), in combination with WHOIS if you want to gather information. Or a website of a domain registrar like [2]. Keep in mind that you might be watched doing that, information that could be used to drive up the price again. Or, if you really have good ideas, you convince one of the current registrants to use his domain (guessing here that a lot of those domains are not really in use). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_dom... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dig_(command) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dig_(command) [2] https://shop.gandi.net/en/domain/suggest?search=b.xyz https://shop.gandi.net/en/domain/suggest?search=b.xyz
saizai 6y ago
Anguilla permits them. I had to buy off a squatter. But Sai is literally my full name (I'm mononymous), at the time it was affordable to buy off the squatter, and the per year registration fee isn't too high. So I think it's certainly been worth it.
- tygrak 6y ago
  That's really cool! Both being mononymous and having a one letter domain. Conlangs are also really cool! You are a pretty cool person!
  - 6y ago

foobar_ 6y ago

Programming is a non linear writing system. Now that I think of it ... if you replace functions names with logograms you get a top to down writing system of sorts.

atennapel 6y ago
Maybe a pure logical programming language such as MiniKanren can be seen as non-linear? There you just read in all the rules you defined and (I think) it does not matter in which order you try to match the rules when you query the system.
- foobar_ 6y ago
  > Every glyph includes a number of binding points, one for each of its arguments, the semantic roles involved in its meaning. For instance, the glyph glossed as eat has two binding points—one for the thing consumed and one for the consumer. The glyph glossed as (be) fish has only one, the fish. Often we give glosses more like “X eat Y”, so as to give names for the binding points (X is eater, Y is eaten). Seems so ... even in logic programming we have logic glyphs. Maths is full of glyphs with connectors, especially the integral sign. <bank-glyph>->50<money-glyph> is sorta analogous to bank->withdraw(50) ... (HN seems to be removing emojis) This makes sense ... is this how chinese words operate ? Its logical and it makes sense why early languages were logogram based. In normal languages like english it seems the "connection" points are separate and split into separate words. Has anyone done research on commonly used words in code ?
  - saizai 6y ago
    UNLWS can definitely be described as being based on "predicate calculus" (as in formal logic). I personally have never felt it to be a very apt or helpful description — I think of it more in terms of Lakoff-style "frames". However, every glyph in UNLWS, including the all-pervasive minimal glyph (a dot, which is implicitly in any line), is a predicate. FWIW, no this isn't how Chinese works — and it isn't ideographic. Hanzi (& Japanese kanji) have both semantic and rhyme hinting components, and aside from a few words that are nearly minimal in their use of radicals (the components), are generally vastly underspecified to get the meaning of the grapheme unless you know it.

gardenfelder 6y ago

They have a bogus link http://eaworld.conlang.org/relays/relay19/relay19.php?ring=3&torch=04&ringlish=N&tlit=n&torchlish=y&reverse=n http://eaworld.conlang.org/relays/relay19/relay19.php?ring=3... which I am not able to decipher.

saizai 6y ago
Thanks for reporting the broken link. Alex has fixed it in the document. The content is now at https://000024.org/conlang/relay19/index.html https://000024.org/conlang/relay19/index.html Google "conlang relay" to learn more about the context for which this was made.

restalis 6y ago

After going through the phase of admiring this new and intellectually stimulating thing, I went on with an exercise of imagination about how it would look like for a society to have evolved somehow into using this at large. Each new word (or at least morpheme) has to have its own signature/ideogram that has to be learned and remembered. For a lexicon of any practical use that would mean thousands of ideograms. That feels quite a burden. An improved solution that I'm able to imagine just now may be to have ideograms only for abstract relations (like for prepositions) and keep "ordinary" words (as the nouns and verbs, at least) formed by a much smaller group of simpler constructs, like we do with alphabet letters? Good stuff, nevertheless.

andrewflnr 6y ago
Ideograms clearly can work, and pretty dang well, as demonstrated by ancient China. Some phonetic representation would be nice too. Either way, you'd likely see common structures evolving into ideograms. Very interesting.
- saizai 6y ago
  FWIW, we deliberately decided to have no phonetic representation at all, to avoid any linearizing influence. Yes, it would need a large number of glyphs. Not so many as speculated above, though — e.g. we have one glyph that covers communicate, say, tell, hear, speech (all senses), etc. (with some mix-ins for sensory modality); another one that covers give, receive, gift, sell, etc. Linear languages with European structure need way more words, because the syntax isn't very able to represent the shared concept between these with a single word. We can. And yes, common structures do get turned into glyphs, or reduced forms. We also have a barely-explored concept about glyphs being fractal (i.e. if you zoom in, it's actually the shape of an underlying utterance whose syntax "draws" the higher order glyph). This presumably would be a sort of literary or poetic form. (I have composed one very simple example.¹) ¹ https://s.ai/poetry/distant_love https://s.ai/poetry/distant_love
  - plutonorm 6y ago
    I love this idea so much that I would like to learn the language. Is there a group or something I could join? Does anyone want to make a group? I'm sure we could work something out with an online drawing app. The possiblity of getting ideas out of my head and onto paper without having to linearise everything is very exciting.

codezero 6y ago

I love that “eat” looks like Pac-Man.

saizai 6y ago
Actually IIRC, that was our inspiration for it. ;)

mickdarling 6y ago

Doesn’t this just boil down to “GOTO may be useful”?

anonytrary 6y ago

Holy shit. I'm blown away by this. Imagine the ability to use these as training inputs for language processing. Just add one more representation to the bucket of things to train models on. Very fascinating. Favoriting this.

saizai 6y ago
Could you elaborate? How do you see this as relating to NLP? FWIW, I very strongly recommend Rick Morneau's monograph Lexical semantics of a machine translation interlingua ¹. It was a major influence for me, and is squarely intended for NLP model-internal usage. ¹ http://www.rickmor.x10.mx/lexical_semantics.html http://www.rickmor.x10.mx/lexical_semantics.html
plutonorm 6y ago
Yes. Also, I suspect that feature vectors would have very natural translations into this kind of language. We could see inside the black box.

KhoomeiK 6y ago

Reminds me of this [1] blog post which was on HN a while ago about Yukaghir's (a paleosiberian group) semasiographic writing system. Also related is this conlang that was posted to r/conlangs maybe a couple years ago that I can't seem to find now. The idea was that you can represent elementary ideas with shapes and then connect those shapes in a non-linear fashion and add slight variations to specify certain semantic properties, allowing there to be numerous different "correct" readings. Also, shameless plug of my blog [2] where I've been fleshing out a similar idea (albeit not focused on writing) for the past few months. It takes inspiration from Discourse Representation Theory and semantic graphs. Edit: Just read about halfway through and the similarities between your conlang and mine are striking. I'd go so far as to say that yours is just a really interesting visual representation of mine. [1] http://historyview.blogspot.com/2011/10/yukaghir-girl-writes-love-letter.html http://historyview.blogspot.com/2011/10/yukaghir-girl-writes... [2] https://rpandey.tech/blog https://rpandey.tech/blog

saizai 6y ago

I'm Sai, co-creator of UNLWS. AMA(relevant).

brian_cloutier 6y ago
Are you still working on it, is there a community I could join to try having a conversation using it?
- saizai 6y ago
  Yes, we're still working on it. (E.g. we were discussing the concept "only" a couple days ago.) Right now, our main blocker is technical: we want a JavaScript based method for rendering it from a DSL, because making, loading, & maintaining images in the doc is a huge pain. We've provisionally decided on using Cytoscape.js, but it needs some extensions to work for us — e.g. cubic splines (it only has quadratic) and relative angles of attachment for edges to nodes. My areas of expertise are mainly back end web dev & analytics, and Alex's are mainly academic math & coding competitions, so JS isn't particularly easy for either of us. We'd appreciate help with this. It's on my GitHub¹; get in contact personally² if interested. As for a speaker community, we don't have one currently, though over the years we've had around 3-4 people express interest. We never really considered it something that others would want to do (though we've always been quite interested in getting feedback, suggestions, etc., and we'd be willing to engage in in-UNLWS dialogue). However, this seems like roughly the critical mass needed for such a community, so I'll try to set one up. Please contact me directly², and LMK any platform preferences. ¹ https://github.com/saizai https://github.com/saizai across a couple recent repos ² https://s.ai/contact https://s.ai/contact
- saizai 6y ago
  I've now made a Slack for it: unlws.slack.com. Invite link: https://join.slack.com/t/ulws/shared_invite/zt-ewevpfmf-s1r3lzEX02QMgglC3ECkZw https://join.slack.com/t/ulws/shared_invite/zt-ewevpfmf-s1r3...

nathell 6y ago

Somewhat related: Sylabitsa, a Hangul-style syllabary for Polish. Described in its current rendition in [1], but previous ideas of the author included vertically stacking syllables, thus making the alphabet potentially infinite and non-linear. [1]: https://sites.google.com/site/qrczakmk/sylabitsa https://sites.google.com/site/qrczakmk/sylabitsa

pham_nuwen 6y ago

This could be utterly beautiful if fused with Dialogue Mapping: http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2009/09/10/the-practice-of-dialogue-mapping-part-1/ http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2009/09/10/the-practice-of-...

dfischer 6y ago

Interesting similarities between signals and Sumerian cuneiform. 1. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/72_Goeta_sigils.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/72_Goeta... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform#/media/File:Sumero-Akkadian_cuneiform_syllabary.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform#/media/File:Sumero-A...