My biggest gripe about English is that there is no consistent relationship between morphology and part of speech. There is a muddy, approximate relationship which is inherited from French/Latin and German, so that for example you typically know that if you see an adjective X, and see a word Xity, then the latter word is a noun meaning "property of being X". Similarly, if you see an adjective Y, and another word Yen, the latter word is a verb meaning "to make Y". But this system is not used consistently. Ideally, a listener (reader) should be able to identify the part of speech of a word immediately by inspection of phonological (typographic) expression.

If you want to follow this rule, you will need to make it easy for people to do the sorts of colloquial grammar-jumping that come up in everyday speech. For example the word "hammer" is a noun but also a verb meaning "to hit with a hammer". "Ship" is a noun but also a verb meaning "to send by ship" and so on.

Another issue with English (and probably other languages) is that prepositions are overloaded, so that the same word can mean different things, as in "Galileo saw a man with a telescope". Since with can mean both by means of and carrying/holding, the sentence is ambiguous. It doesn't seem unreasonable to ask that every important case in which a preposition must be used should correspond to a distinct word.

As continuation from http://lesswrong.com/lw/mij/welcome_to_less_wrong_8th_thread_july_2015/cxaz

a-priori conlang

Yes, just like Loglan/Lojban is a-priori. Apart from simply having more freedom is language design I think the Chinese are more likely to adopt a culturally neutral conlang than one based on European roots like Esperanto.

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.

Not exactly. I decided to copy the Toaq Alpha syllable structure "[C|CC](w|y)[V|VV ](q)" and expended it to "[C|CC](w|y)[V|VV](q/ß)".

I think that roughly all the CV, CCV, CVV space for possible base words should be filled. Afterwards you should be able to add (w|y) in the middle of syllable and (q/ß) at the end to go from caiq [parent] to caiß [boss].

I also have two changes between ce [1] and di [2]. If you simply mishear one phoneme you don't hear 1 instead of 2 but hear a completely different word that doesn't fit into the slot where you would expect a number. That reduces misunderstandings that would appear if I would say ce = [1] and ci = [2].

If you look at Lojban's numbers you see a similar way to use vowels but the consonants are all over the place: 0=no; 1=pa; 2=re; 3=ci; 4=vo; 5=mu; 6=xa; 7=ze; 8=bi; 9=so It would also make more sense if 0 would be 'nu' rather than 'no'.

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.

I think it's okay to require a change to the US international keyboard and stay within AscII. Having more signs allows for shorter words

I ran into some research in which the rate of information transmission of various natural languages was compared.

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

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.

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.

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/ .

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.

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.

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.