The works of Anna Wierzbicka on semantic primitives may be of interest (although they are mainly contained in expensive academic books and gated journal articles). She found a core of about 20 such primitives, although in later work she expanded them substantially. These are primitives discovered (by her methods) from the study of human languages, rather than constructed on a logical basis.
On this recomendation I read her latest book Imprisoned in English. I think it would make a lot of sense to write the core dictionary of a new language in what Anna Wierzbicka calls mini-english.
That definition for example has Ekman's anger described as:
it can be like this:
someone thinks like this about someone else:
“this someone is doing some things now
this is bad
I want something to happen, it can’t happen if this someone does things like this
this someone knows this
because of this, I want to do something
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.