Applied Ontology: An Introduction. The better you understand the ontological structure of the word the better you will be able to design a language that can precisely describe the ontological structure of the world.
Understanding the true ontological structure of the world is very non trivial, and you might want an improved language to do it in before get finished.
Agreed. This was one of my more painful realizations, that I might have to do more than one iteration of the conlang before developing a finished product, because there will be no way to understand the flaws in the first version well enough to correct them until after learning to speak it fluently.
Understanding the true ontological structure of the world is very non trivial, and you might want an improved language to do it in before get finished.
I don't think that you need to know the ultimate truth to learn useful things from applied ontology to design a better language than you would design if you ignorant of applied ontology.
I think this is one of those cases where philosophy is helpful and it makes sense to read people like Barry Smith. If you want to speak about obligations (may/should/must) it makes sense to not simply copy the existing words of the English language but first read serious philosophy on what kind of categories of obligations exist. Yes, the resulting language won't be perfect but it will be better than the language that you will be building when you simply copy English.
I've looked into the subject of ontologies (I did research on knowledge base design years ago). The problem wasn't finding ontologies, but finding non-arbitrary ontologies. That is, no matter how one ontology categorized entities, you could always find another that categorized them differently, and no non-arbitrary reason to select one over the other. And I didn't want to give in to the temptation to just choose one and use it regardless. I finally gave up and decided that treating each concept in isolation (for the purpose of dictionary building) was better than using an ontology that some users might find highly counter-intuitive.
One aspect of Lojban that you may find useful is a sub-portion of it, which can be used as a bolt-on addition to other languages to improve their functionality: Cniglic, which I've compiled a handy reference to at http://www.datapacrat.com/cniglic/ .
I took a look at Cniglic. It seems similar to an idea that I noted as a candidate for an eventual add-on, to use diacritic marks as emotion indicators. The problem that this was intended to solve is that it seems overly limiting to be restricted to the one emotion indicator "!", and to have to put it at the end of the sentence. I much prefer the idea of having many such indicators, and being able to apply them freely throughout sentences. Implementing them as optional diacritic marks above vowels seemed like the best bet. But I haven't gone anywhere with the basic idea, except that at one point I began looking for a "definitive" list of human emotional states. I don't remember ever finding a list that I thought was reliable.
Also, there's the problem of enforcement. If, for example, you require that each statement end with an evidential, then what will stop irritated users from simply omitting it?
In English every sentence ends in ".", "?" or "!". You can't simply omit those because otherwise a new sentence won't start. I think it's good for evidentials to end sentence's in the same way.
Recently I develed a bit into radical honesty. Radical honesty proclaims that you say what's on your mind. However instead of saying: "You are angry", you can say "I imagine you are angry". The usage of "I imagine" makes the conversation much nicer. It's part of what stops people practicing radical honesty from being assholes. At the same time "I imagine" costs four syllables. The direct translation into German is even more clumsy: "Ich stelle mir vor, dass". It would be much nicer if the language integrates evidentials by default.
The problem that I see with this is that people are basically lazy-brained. Even if a language requires that you choose a final particle that indicates evidentiality, people will just not use it. For example, if the written form of a language requires that a sentence end with ".", "?" or "!", and each one is an evidential particle, then tomorrow someone on the internet will say "By the way everyone, I'm tired of doing all of this evidentiality stuff when I don't need to, so I'm just going to write '_' at the end of all of my sentences, and it doesn't mean anything but that the sentence is over." Within a week the convention will be adopted all over the world, and mandatory evidentiality will be a thing of the past. It might or might not be a good idea, but I just can't see a grammatical requirement overcoming human laziness.
Many years ago an acquaintance of mine in college said "A system without an application is a useless ornament." I believe that he was quoting someone, although I have no idea who (BTW, if anyone here knows where this quote might have come from I'd appreciate the reference). In the case of a conlang, part of the beauty comes from the fact of its widespread use. While I agree that mandatory evidentials are a tempting idea (I'd certainly like a language that has them), I don't believe that they'd hold up well in actual use.
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.
Also, the topic is now up and running in the regular "discussion" area.
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.
You didn't mention ithkuil, but it basically has the same goal of incorporating every aspect of language that promotes clear thinking. Would look into it to see if it's what you're looking for.
I looked at the Wikipedia page for Ithkuil. It doesn't seem to be geared towards preventing cognitive errors, so much as packing as much information as possible into as few phonemes as possible. For most of them I can't see the point. In English I can say "Trees are green." in a few simple words. From the sound of it, in Ithkuil I'd have to pack in so much information about the trees that it would take me an hour to figure out how to write the sentence. Is the set of trees spatially contiguous, in a specific but unnamed forest? Or is this the set of all trees on earth, being denoted as members of an abstractly defined set? And how do I feel about the matter?
Also, the creator packed the phoneme set so tightly that I can't see how he's going to avoid a high rate of transmission errors. There comes a point where you've got so many vowel sounds that individual sounds are so close together in phonetic space that you can't reliably distinguish between them.
So far I've been going in the opposite direction. Rather than including multiple layers of meaning in each word by complicating the sounds and grammar, I've been planning to restrict meaning to one meaning per word, with each additional bit of information requiring more text to transmit, and no restrictions on what the user can leave out because it's irrelevant. It looks to me like Ithkuil goes in the opposite direction. Which isn't to say that there isn't some interesting material there. The creator seems to have broken down his informational overlays into unusual categories, such as "configuration", "affiliation", "perspective", and so forth. It would be interesting to read about why he selected the categories that he did. So there might be some interesting stuff there to borrow. But it seems that he gave up too much in the way of usability. What good is a language that decreases the frequency of common cognitive errors, if the only people who can use it are already so smart that they rarely make such errors?
There are languages like Aymara that incorporate evidentiality, that is, you can't express a thought without also saying how you know it. This forces the speaker to be always aware of the degree of certainty of every statement.
I have a number of evidential categories available for use, as well as some relating to certainty, which I view as a separate issue (source versus certainty). But I hadn't put any thought into making their use mandatory. There are certainly advantages to making it impossible to hide information by making the inclusion of some information carrying categories necessary. But it seems to me that not all possible information is going to be relevant to all possible statements or circumstances, and that forcing everyone to always include evidentials, even when they aren't relevant, will carry a high price. There are probably aspects of speech other than evidentials that it would be advantageous to include in some circumstances. If the grammar requires that they all be included in every statement, then every statement will be overcrowded with irrelevant add-ons. Also, there's the problem of enforcement. If, for example, you require that each statement end with an evidential, then what will stop irritated users from simply omitting it? If you create a system of grammar such that each of the add-ons must, unavoidably, be merged into the words, perhaps by some mechanism similar to verb conjugation, then how many people would volunteer to use such an inconveniently complex language? In order to be successful, a constructed language must be designed such that many people will want to use it. Only a few have reached that peak, such as Esperanto, and Klingon.
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.
It sounds like you were trying to construct an a-priori conlang, in which the meaning of any word could be determined from its spelling, because the spelling is sufficient to give the word exact coordinates on a concept graph of some sort. I thought about this approach some time ago, but was never able to find a non-arbitrary concept graph to use, or a system of word formation that didn't create overly long or unpronounceable words.
I was originally thinking about including non-ascii characters, but eventually compromised on retaining English capitals instead. The biggest problem that any conlang faces is getting people to use it, and anything that makes that more difficult, such as requiring changes to the standard American keyboard, needs to be avoided unless it's absolutely necessary.
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I'm interested into that research. Can you link it?
Sorry, I don't have a link for it. The result is just something that I remember reading about many years ago. I looked at the link that redding posted and while it probably isn't the same paper (I think I read about this before 2011) the result seems to match what I remember. There's a possibility that if the linked paper could be retrieved, then whatever I read may be in the bibliography, although I don't know if I'd recognize it as such.