Linguistic mechanisms for less wrong cognition

KevinGrant_duplicate0.2409764628391713

I'm working on a conlang (constructed language) and would like some input from the Less Wrong community. One of the goals is to investigate the old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis regarding language affecting cognition. Does anyone here have any ideas regarding linguistic mechanisms that would encourage more rational thinking, apart from those that are present in the oft-discussed conlangs e-prime, loglan, and its offshoot lojban? Or perhaps mechanisms that are used in one of those conlangs, but might be buried too deeply for a person such as myself, who only has superficial knowledge about them, to have recognized? Any input is welcomed, from other conlangs to crazy ideas.

Since other replies are drifting in this direction, I'll reply to my own post with a comment about Heinlein's fictional conlang Speedtalk, to which Ithkuil has been compared. Like a lot of people, it was one of the ideas that got me interested in conlangs. But after a bit of research I concluded that it wasn't a fruitful direction to head in. I ran into some research in which the rate of information transmission of various natural languages was compared. It turns out that in languages that are spoken faster, as measured in phonemes per second, the information carrying content, measured in bits per phoneme, is smaller. The result is that you really don't seem to get a lot of bang for your buck by monkeying around with your language design to try to increase the rate of information transmission. The bottleneck at the high end seems to be in the processing capacity of the brain, not the structure of the language.

I ran into some research in which the rate of information transmission of various natural languages was compared. It turns out that in languages that are spoken faster, as measured in phonemes per second, the information carrying content, measured in bits per phoneme, is smaller.

This doesn't seem likely to generalize reliably to specialist constructed languages. I believe that it is true it when it comes down to average people talking about everyday things, but specialist subjects use specialized jargon and a shared bank of knowledge to communicate very... (read more)

1ChristianKl10y

I'm interested into that research. Can you link it?

9ChristianKl10y

I think a core feature of a new conlang should be that it has a systematized way to express concepts. After making my first draft of a language I decided to dig deeper into modern applied ontology. I would recommend Barry Smith's and Katherine Munn's Applied Ontology: An Introduction. The better you understand the ontological structure of the world the better you will be able to design a language that can precisely describe the ontological structure of the world. [...] If you have a sentence like "Four plus five is nine" that's very hard to transmit in a language like Pirahã that doesn't have a word for four but has only "one, two and many". It might be able to say two-two for four and two-two-one for five but it's really hard to express the sentence. I think English does have cases where it's a bit like Pirahã. We have four cardinal directions and if we want to go in a 45° angle we say north-east. Base 10 is integrated into our language in a way that we can't simply switch to base 12 or base 16 when we want to do so on a whim. Another quite horrible case is the English word of "feel". It mixes so many different cases together. You don't have a similar distinction as between "see" and "look" for feel. Feel get's used both to thing inside your own body and outside. Láadan has: loláad = to perceive internally, to feel a mental state or emotion, perceive with the heart (metaphorically). Passive internal feeling. "I feel sad." lowitheláad = to feel, as if directly, another's feelings (pain/joy/ anger/grief/surprise/ etc.); to be empathetic, without the separation implied in empathy dama = to touch, to feel with the skin. Active touching, feeling. "I am feeling the texture of the yarn." (see láad oyanan, passive touch) náril = to feel internally, to fix your internal attention actively upon something, to-continue-to-present-time. Active internal feeling. "I am feeling angry." (see loláad, passive internal feeling) láad oyanan = to perceive with the skin, to feel so

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Linguistic mechanisms for less wrong cognition

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Linguistic mechanisms for less wrong cognition

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