Welcome to Less Wrong! (8th thread, July 2015)

Sarunas

19 Welcome to Less Wrong! (8th thread, July 2015)

22nd Jul 2015

7 min read

19

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_{Once a post gets over 500 comments, the site stops showing them all by default. If this post has 500 comments and you have 20 karma, please do start the next welcome post; a new post is a good perennial way to encourage newcomers and lurkers to introduce themselves. (Step-by-step, foolproof instructions here; takes <180seconds.)}

_{If there's anything I should add or update on this post (especially broken links), please send me a private message—I may not notice a comment on the post.}

_{Finally, a big thank you to everyone that helped write this post via its predecessors!}

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19 Welcome to Less Wrong! (8th thread, July 2015)

by Sarunas

22nd Jul 2015

7 min read

273

19

A few notes about the site mechanics

EXTRA FEATURES:

There's actually more than meets the eye here: look near the top of the page for the "WIKI", "DISCUSSION" and "SEQUENCES" links.

A few notes about the community

A list of some posts that are pretty awesome

More suggestions are welcome! Or just check out the top-rated posts from the history of Less Wrong. Most posts at +50 or more are well worth your time.

Welcome to Less Wrong, and we look forward to hearing from you throughout the site!

_{If there's anything I should add or update on this post (especially broken links), please send me a private message—I may not notice a comment on the post.}

_{Finally, a big thank you to everyone that helped write this post via its predecessors!}

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Personal Blog

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ChristianKl10y10

I do have a conlang draft. A few thoughts based on my conlang thinking:

Loglan/Lojban is a language were math was an afterthought. That's likely mistake. If you look at a concept like grandfather, using the word "grand" doesn't make much sense. I think it's better to say something like father-one for grandfather, father-two for great-grandfather. The same way the boss of your boss should be boss-one. Having a grammer in which relationships can be expressed well is very valuable.

I think that loglan attempt to build on existing roots of the widely spoken languages is flawed because it allows less freedom organizing the language effectively. It would be good to have a lot of concepts with 3 letters instead of 5.

In my language draft I started to take concept of graph theory for naming relationships (the structure of the words matters but the actual word is provisional):

bei node in same graph
cai node parent
doi node children

beiq relative
caiq parent
doiq son/daughter

bei person employed in the same company
caiß boss (person with authority to order)
doiß direct (person who can be ordered)

Once you understand that structure and learn the new word "fuiq" for sibling, you can guess that a direct coworker is called fuiß. Of the in a graph notes that share the same parent note are "fui".

I like grouping concepts this way where I can go from parent to son/daughter simply by going one forward in the alphabet and replace "c" with "d" and "a" with "o" ("i" get's skipped because the word ends in "i").

I did use a similar principle for naming numbers: ba 0
ce 1
di 2
fo 3
gu 4
ha 5
je 6

For the number I also gave adding a "q" meaning. It turn the number into base 16. Base 16 numbers are later quite useful if you want to make an expression like north-east. At the moment pilots use phrases based on the clock to navigate: "There's a bird at 2 o'clock." It's much better to bake numbers more centrally into the language.

In case you haven't seen it http://selpahi.de/ToaqAlphaPrimer.html is a nice draft for a new language. I like how the language makes every sentence end in an evidential. In it I think he makes a mistake that he doesn't use capital letters but non-asci character instead.

I think that it's great that his language doesn't follow the Lojban place system but uses prepositions like a normal language.

KevinGrant_duplicate0.240976462839171310y10

Also, the topic is now up and running in the regular "discussion" area.

1KevinGrant_duplicate0.240976462839171310y

It sounds like you were trying to construct an a-priori conlang, in which the meaning of any word could be determined from its spelling, because the spelling is sufficient to give the word exact coordinates on a concept graph of some sort. I thought about this approach some time ago, but was never able to find a non-arbitrary concept graph to use, or a system of word formation that didn't create overly long or unpronounceable words. I was originally thinking about including non-ascii characters, but eventually compromised on retaining English capitals instead. The biggest problem that any conlang faces is getting people to use it, and anything that makes that more difficult, such as requiring changes to the standard American keyboard, needs to be avoided unless it's absolutely necessary.

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