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 (bad) to this someone”
when this someone thinks like this, this someone feels something bad because of this,
like people often do when they think like this
The german word Wut get's described as:
it can be like this:
someone thinks like this:
“something bad is happening here now
I don’t want this
I want to do something to something because of this now, I can’t not do something
Anna then shows how the words aren't completely interchangable even when the German Wut is the nearest word to the English anger. This mini-english has also the benefit of being automatically translateable into a variety of languages.
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.