Suggestion: A language for linguists

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em3ry
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Suggestion: A language for linguists

Post by em3ry »

A conlang that breaks language down into its fundamental units would be very useful for linguists.
For example
  • "Today" = this day.
  • "Bird" = flying (edit: warm-blooded) upright reptile (desert quadruped).
  • "Boy" = young male human.
  • "Now" = at this time
  • "Here" = at this place
Every word and idea would have to be built up from fundamental units.

It would not be a practical language of course but it would be useful for linguists and for those studying language translation and artificial intelligence. Depending on how it was done it might also have some limited usefulness as an international auxiliary language. It would also be useful for conlangers who are attempting to build their own conlangs.
Last edited by em3ry on 08 Jan 2022 02:35, edited 12 times in total.
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Re: Suggestion: A language for linguists

Post by Iyionaku »

There are a couple of languages like this. The most famous of them is probably Toki Pona. You might also want to look at (allegedly) syntactically unambiguous languages that are based on formal logic, like Lojban.
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Re: Suggestion: A language for linguists

Post by WeepingElf »

Such languages were already invented in the 17th century, such as Dalgarno's Ars signorum or John Wilkins's Real Character. Back then, they were called philosophical languages, with philosophical to be understood as 'scientific'.

EDIT: Today, such languages are called oligosynthetic by conlangers, while most people would probably consider them pedantic.
Last edited by WeepingElf on 06 Jan 2022 15:30, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Suggestion: A language for linguists

Post by em3ry »

Five tenses:

yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I was going to fix the car
yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I began fixing the car
yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I was fixing the car
yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I finished fixing the car
yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I had fixed the car
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Re: Suggestion: A language for linguists

Post by qwed117 »

em3ry wrote: 05 Jan 2022 22:10 Five tenses:

yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I was going to fix the car
yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I began fixing the car
yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I was fixing the car
yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I finished fixing the car
yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I had fixed the car
Those are more aspects than tense, but I'm gonna note, there's no need to have tense or aspect in any language. I think it would be much simpler to actually just dispense with that as a whole. --

But with regards to this, I don't see why this is very necessary, most linguists use some form of glossing in order to define their subjects and it usually works fairly well. Also idk why bird = flying dinosaur, and not say, pterosaurs, or archaeopteryx and its relatives. Dinosaurs are traditionally described as the paraphyletic group that excludes birds, and it's only the more recent, more scientific phylogenetic taxonomies that describe dinosaurs as a clade.
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Re: Suggestion: A language for linguists

Post by em3ry »

Yes I forgot about pterosaurs. "Birds" = flying warm-blooded dinosaurs.
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Re: Suggestion: A language for linguists

Post by VaptuantaDoi »

em3ry wrote: 06 Jan 2022 12:23 Yes I forgot about pterosaurs. "Birds" = flying warm-blooded dinosaurs.
And what would you call a chaffinch using fundamental units?
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Re: Suggestion: A language for linguists

Post by em3ry »

Four more tenses

yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I was someday going to fix the car
yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I was going to fix the car
yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I was just about to start fixing the car
yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I began fixing the car
yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I was fixing the car
yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I finished fixing the car
yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I had just fixed the car
yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I had fixed the car
yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I had once fixed the car
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Re: Suggestion: A language for linguists

Post by Salmoneus »

em3ry wrote: 06 Jan 2022 12:23 Yes I forgot about pterosaurs. "Birds" = flying warm-blooded dinosaurs.
Pterosaurs were warm-blooded. That's why they were covered in fur.
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Re: Suggestion: A language for linguists

Post by Iyionaku »

em3ry wrote: 06 Jan 2022 12:23 Yes I forgot about pterosaurs. "Birds" = flying warm-blooded dinosaurs.
I would suggest using "bird" as a primary word instead of "dinosaur", given that bird is a lot more common (according to the Google ngram viewer, "bird" is about 15 to 25 times more frequent than "dinosaur" in the English language). But of course it's your language, so you can do as you please!
em3ry wrote: 06 Jan 2022 12:58 Four more tenses

yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I was someday going to fix the car
yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I was going to fix the car
yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I was just about to start fixing the car
yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I began fixing the car
yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I was fixing the car
yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I finished fixing the car
yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I had just fixed the car
yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I had fixed the car
yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I had once fixed the car
As qwed has already stated, these are called aspects, not tenses. A tense marks the relation of the action time to the current time, which you have explicitly marked as irrelevant. An aspect, however, marks how an action or event extends over time, which is what you're describing.
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Re: Suggestion: A language for linguists

Post by em3ry »

I messed it up (as usual)

yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I (going to or already) start fixing the car

yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I (going to or already) stop fixing the car

yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I (going to or already) resume fixing the car

yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I (going to or already) continue fixing the car

yesterday (or tomorrow or now) I (going to or already) finish fixing the car (I fixed the car)
Last edited by em3ry on 07 Jan 2022 03:51, edited 7 times in total.
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Re: Suggestion: A language for linguists

Post by Lorik »

em3ry wrote: 05 Jan 2022 00:14"Bird" = flying (edit: warm-blooded) upright reptile (desert quadruped)
Why describe reptiles as "desert quadrupeds" if not all reptiles are quadrupeds and reptiles live in many other biomes? And besides, why describe humans with one word, reptiles with two and birds with five? Was it your intention to make birds the "least fundamental" of the group, so to speak?

Edit: and isn't "upright quadruped" a contradiction?
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Re: Suggestion: A language for linguists

Post by em3ry »

I Lorik wrote: 06 Jan 2022 23:22
em3ry wrote: 05 Jan 2022 00:14"Bird" = flying (edit: warm-blooded) upright reptile (desert quadruped)
Why describe reptiles as "desert quadrupeds" if not all reptiles are quadrupeds and reptiles live in many other biomes? And besides, why describe humans with one word, reptiles with two and birds with five? Was it your intention to make birds the "least fundamental" of the group, so to speak?

Edit: and isn't "upright quadruped" a contradiction?
They were desert quadrupeds when they evolved. "Upright" means not splayed.
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Re: Suggestion: A language for linguists

Post by em3ry »

Universal_Language_Dictionary: https://www.frathwiki.com/Universal_Language_Dictionary

And of course there is always Basic English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English

And Roget's Thesaurus: http://www.roget.org/graphics.htm
Last edited by em3ry on 09 Jan 2022 07:48, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Suggestion: A language for linguists

Post by Nortaneous »

For tenses, IIRC there was some research on using certain creoles with elaborate and regular tense/aspect systems for something involving machine translation with Bible-translation corpuses, but I've forgotten the details and can't find it now
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Re: Suggestion: A language for linguists

Post by em3ry »

Code: Select all

word           type of            field
blue    adj    color              physics
next    adj    sequence           graph theory (directed graph)
from    adv    origin             geometry
human   noun   living thing       biology
"john" is an instance of "human".
"john falling" is an event which is an instance of "falling" which is a type of verb
adjectives are verbs in disguise. The verb for "blue" is "is blue".
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Re: Suggestion: A language for linguists

Post by em3ry »

Each content word will be consonant+vowel+nasal (like Chinese). Cannot start with "s" or a nasal. Consonant clusters are not allowed.

"S" will be added before the word to reverse direction of verbs.

Structure words and prefixes will be consonant+vowel.

Suffixes will be vowel+nasal.
Example:
  • "On" = person.
Some determiners will consist of only a single consonant cluster. This is added to a suffix to form words.
Example:
  • "Kw" = what.
  • "Kwon" = what person (i.e. who).
Likewise from "fore" we can form:
  • Forward
  • Go foreward
  • Front
  • Foremost
  • Former
  • Before
Pronouns combine
  • "Si" = me
  • "Pi" = you
  • "Li" = other
  • "Lai" = others
  • "Spi" = me and you
  • "Splai" = me, you, and others
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Re: Suggestion: A language for linguists

Post by em3ry »

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_primes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_s ... talanguage


Semantic primes (also known as semantic primitives) are concepts that are universal, meaning that they can be translated literally into any known language and retain their semantic representation, and primitive, as they are proposed to be the most simple linguistic concepts and are unable to be defined using simpler terms.

Proponents of the NSM theory argue that every language shares a core vocabulary of concepts. In 1994 and 2002, Goddard and Wierzbicka studied languages across the globe and found strong evidence supporting this argument.

Wierzbicka's 1972 study proposed 14 semantic primes. That number was expanded to 60 in 2002 by Wierzbicka and Goddard, and the current agreed-upon number is 65
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Re: Suggestion: A language for linguists

Post by WeepingElf »

em3ry wrote: 15 Jan 2022 00:42 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_primes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_s ... talanguage


Semantic primes (also known as semantic primitives) are concepts that are universal, meaning that they can be translated literally into any known language and retain their semantic representation, and primitive, as they are proposed to be the most simple linguistic concepts and are unable to be defined using simpler terms.
And they span what mathematicians call a lattice. Leibniz already had the idea of mapping this lattice into the divisibility lattice of natural numbers, mapping semantic primes onto prime numbers, and more complex concepts to the according prime number products. I call this an "arithmographic language", and wish to try it out one day - alas, I have enough projects already.
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Re: Suggestion: A language for linguists

Post by eldin raigmore »

WeepingElf wrote: 15 Jan 2022 13:25 And they span what mathematicians call a lattice. Leibniz already had the idea of mapping this lattice into the divisibility lattice of natural numbers, mapping semantic primes onto prime numbers, and more complex concepts to the according prime number products. I call this an "arithmographic language", and wish to try it out one day - alas, I have enough projects already.
Sounds kind of like what Kurt Goedel started to do.
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