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.
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.
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 something on your skin, touch. Passive feeling. "The silk feels good to me." (see dama, active touch)
When you say "Alice is afraid of Bob", the sentence doesn't transmit whether the author is speaking about a feeling or an emotion. Modern psychology has distinct notions of feeling and emotion but it's hard to express it, because the language hasn't really caught up with it. That's again a situation where it's important to familiarize yourself with the modern ontology instead of simply copying the ontology of the existing language. Having a richer language that can express more shades of meaning is a reason for people write literature in the language instead of writing in English. Literature that also can't be easily translated back into English.
Having different words for different concepts is great, but creating a new vocabulary will not be enough. There needs to be some training to make people use the words correctly. Otherwise they will just use the new words incorrectly.
This usually happens when people learn a foreign language that maps one word from their native language to two or more words in the foreign language. For example native English speakers often have problems differentiating "ser", "estar" and "hay" in Spanish, which all get translated as "to be&...
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.