KevinGrant comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (8th thread, July 2015) - Less Wrong

13 Post author: Sarunas 22 July 2015 04:49PM

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Comment author: ChristianKl 28 November 2015 07:00:25PM *  1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: KevinGrant 29 November 2015 09:27:46AM 1 point [-]

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