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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

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.
    - uryga 6y ago
      i'd love a group like that!
    - saizai 6y ago
      There is now: https://join.slack.com/t/ulws/shared_invite/zt-ewevpfmf-s1r3lzEX02QMgglC3ECkZw https://join.slack.com/t/ulws/shared_invite/zt-ewevpfmf-s1r3...
  - andrewflnr 6y ago
    Re phonetics, this may not be your goal but I was thinking about it from the standpoint of potential wide-scale usage. In that scenario, you would want phonetics for handling foreign words, or for literally discussing phonetics if nothing else. I didn't see on the page how you handle narrative, but I can imagine handing phonetic descriptions the same way. Maybe "forward" goes in a circular pattern rather than "linear"? You already have sequences like that in the distributive construct.
    - saizai 6y ago
      We have absolutely no interest in wide-scale usage, let alone if it were to come at the expense of fully exploring what a natively-2D language is like. Narrative is an utterly different thing in UNLWS. We simply do not have "stories" in the same sense as you're used to. The closest so far is that, rather than the reward/punchline/moral/etc coming from the ordering of things, it comes from understanding the whole, i.e. as an emergent effect of the gestalt. We don't try to have things that aren't native to 2D. We are, if necessary, able to describe something that happens on a linear timeline - that's pretty easy actually - but it simply isn't the "normal" way to arrange a large utterance. We just aren't all that interested in temporal order. We'd be more likely to represent the underlying structural order, or causality networks. We do have a quotative, and we've talked about using IPA if we ever needed to literally refer to phonetics for some reason, but so far we simply haven't needed or wanted to do so. (Not for names, either. Names are assigned in a manner that's native to UNLWS; we don't care at all about the phonetic form in another language. Consider ASL, which does this partially [for people who do have sign-names, and under extremely heavy contact with English as a dominant language].) We never borrow foreign words phonetically. That is just as alien to UNLWS as assigning Chinese hanzi to a name based on their meanings or stroke #s would be to an English-only speaker. We only borrow concepts, and that's only after (sometimes radically) rethinking what those concepts actually are, underlyingly, and what an UNLWS-native perspective of them would entail. We want to explore two-dimensional language in its own right. Although we do care about expressive power, we really don't care whether it's easily translatable to/from any other languages.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pmontra 6y ago
Words (nouns) should not be a problem, verbs maybe are. "A gives a to B" is set in the language if I understand it correctly. How to add novel concepts and interactions? There could be the risk of a reduced expressiveness compared to the spoken language which in this case is English. Anyway, natural languages had thousands (millions?) of years to evolve, this one is at the very beginning. I wonder, we don't have a natural written language like this one because it was too difficult to devise or because it's suboptimal so phonetic, syllabic and characters (as for Chinese) won?
- saizai 6y ago
  … or because of pure happenstance, i.e. it just didn't come up? Extant natural languages (including dead ones) do not come anywhere close to coming the entire ambit of what could happen in a language. My interest as a conlanger is precisely that — exploring the boundaries of what language can be, not merely what it is. As for expressiveness, I think that, within the things we've gotten to, it's just a expressive as English — and actually more so, for the things that are natural to a non-linear or recursive way of thinking. Obviously we haven't gotten to everything. The lexicon, and grammar, are nowhere near complete. So, yes, we'll need to make lots more to cover everything. Though also, we deliberately don't make every distinction English does, and we make distinctions English doesn't. It's a very noob move to make a conlang lexically (or even conceptually) 1:1 with a natlang. It took us several months to figure out a non-linearly-natural way to express "if", for example. A noob would have just chucked in a new glyph and called it a day. We had to rethink fundamentals (like the scoping of irrealis); the result, IMO, is far more interesting. As for optimality, that has nearly nothing to do with how natlangs spread. You learn a language because you need to — economically, socially, or militarily — not because it's better. And how they evolve also has almost nothing to do with optimality in any hackery sense. That's an entirely different, stochastic process. It has some tendencies towards eg simplicity, regularity, etc, but just as many against. In any case, the result is that natural languages don't have teleology; they don't become "better" over time, just different.
  - restalis 6y ago
    "natural languages don't have teleology; they don't become «better» over time, just different" I remember reading about the dynamic of language evolution, where an influx of new (and language-wise uneducated) speakers tend to botch and thus simplify much of the existing linguistic constructs. Then there is the opposite effect, where once the group of speakers becomes more uniform and educated, people become more willing to adopt/respect language conventions and even go on looking for ways to express more nuanced distinctions and improve the language in general.
g8tor 6y ago
So, like, Chinese? They seem to be doing okay.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
I can imagine that this 'formal' definition would evolve to an informal language, where things are simplified and symbolized into a new 'character' for which the meaning is generally agreed on. See also: regional / cultural slang, internet / text speak. You can say "n00b" instead of "new person", or ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ instead of "idk" or "I don't know".

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.
  - uryga 6y ago
    i'd love a group like that!
  - saizai 6y ago
    There is now: https://join.slack.com/t/ulws/shared_invite/zt-ewevpfmf-s1r3lzEX02QMgglC3ECkZw https://join.slack.com/t/ulws/shared_invite/zt-ewevpfmf-s1r3...
- andrewflnr 6y ago
  Re phonetics, this may not be your goal but I was thinking about it from the standpoint of potential wide-scale usage. In that scenario, you would want phonetics for handling foreign words, or for literally discussing phonetics if nothing else. I didn't see on the page how you handle narrative, but I can imagine handing phonetic descriptions the same way. Maybe "forward" goes in a circular pattern rather than "linear"? You already have sequences like that in the distributive construct.
  - saizai 6y ago
    We have absolutely no interest in wide-scale usage, let alone if it were to come at the expense of fully exploring what a natively-2D language is like. Narrative is an utterly different thing in UNLWS. We simply do not have "stories" in the same sense as you're used to. The closest so far is that, rather than the reward/punchline/moral/etc coming from the ordering of things, it comes from understanding the whole, i.e. as an emergent effect of the gestalt. We don't try to have things that aren't native to 2D. We are, if necessary, able to describe something that happens on a linear timeline - that's pretty easy actually - but it simply isn't the "normal" way to arrange a large utterance. We just aren't all that interested in temporal order. We'd be more likely to represent the underlying structural order, or causality networks. We do have a quotative, and we've talked about using IPA if we ever needed to literally refer to phonetics for some reason, but so far we simply haven't needed or wanted to do so. (Not for names, either. Names are assigned in a manner that's native to UNLWS; we don't care at all about the phonetic form in another language. Consider ASL, which does this partially [for people who do have sign-names, and under extremely heavy contact with English as a dominant language].) We never borrow foreign words phonetically. That is just as alien to UNLWS as assigning Chinese hanzi to a name based on their meanings or stroke #s would be to an English-only speaker. We only borrow concepts, and that's only after (sometimes radically) rethinking what those concepts actually are, underlyingly, and what an UNLWS-native perspective of them would entail. We want to explore two-dimensional language in its own right. Although we do care about expressive power, we really don't care whether it's easily translatable to/from any other languages.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

pmontra 6y ago

Words (nouns) should not be a problem, verbs maybe are. "A gives a to B" is set in the language if I understand it correctly. How to add novel concepts and interactions? There could be the risk of a reduced expressiveness compared to the spoken language which in this case is English. Anyway, natural languages had thousands (millions?) of years to evolve, this one is at the very beginning. I wonder, we don't have a natural written language like this one because it was too difficult to devise or because it's suboptimal so phonetic, syllabic and characters (as for Chinese) won?

saizai 6y ago
… or because of pure happenstance, i.e. it just didn't come up? Extant natural languages (including dead ones) do not come anywhere close to coming the entire ambit of what could happen in a language. My interest as a conlanger is precisely that — exploring the boundaries of what language can be, not merely what it is. As for expressiveness, I think that, within the things we've gotten to, it's just a expressive as English — and actually more so, for the things that are natural to a non-linear or recursive way of thinking. Obviously we haven't gotten to everything. The lexicon, and grammar, are nowhere near complete. So, yes, we'll need to make lots more to cover everything. Though also, we deliberately don't make every distinction English does, and we make distinctions English doesn't. It's a very noob move to make a conlang lexically (or even conceptually) 1:1 with a natlang. It took us several months to figure out a non-linearly-natural way to express "if", for example. A noob would have just chucked in a new glyph and called it a day. We had to rethink fundamentals (like the scoping of irrealis); the result, IMO, is far more interesting. As for optimality, that has nearly nothing to do with how natlangs spread. You learn a language because you need to — economically, socially, or militarily — not because it's better. And how they evolve also has almost nothing to do with optimality in any hackery sense. That's an entirely different, stochastic process. It has some tendencies towards eg simplicity, regularity, etc, but just as many against. In any case, the result is that natural languages don't have teleology; they don't become "better" over time, just different.
- restalis 6y ago
  "natural languages don't have teleology; they don't become «better» over time, just different" I remember reading about the dynamic of language evolution, where an influx of new (and language-wise uneducated) speakers tend to botch and thus simplify much of the existing linguistic constructs. Then there is the opposite effect, where once the group of speakers becomes more uniform and educated, people become more willing to adopt/respect language conventions and even go on looking for ways to express more nuanced distinctions and improve the language in general.

g8tor 6y ago

So, like, Chinese? They seem to be doing okay.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

I can imagine that this 'formal' definition would evolve to an informal language, where things are simplified and symbolized into a new 'character' for which the meaning is generally agreed on. See also: regional / cultural slang, internet / text speak. You can say "n00b" instead of "new person", or ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ instead of "idk" or "I don't know".