Comment author:Ben_Jones
12 February 2008 02:10:02PM
5 points
[-]
Without concern for the proper use of words, language becomes useless.
A valid point, as long as you're careful that language work for you and not vice versa. The moment you find the expression of your concept being stifled by grammar or vocabulary or tradition, find another way. Invent a new word; define it using comparison, differentiation, pictures, hand signals, noises. Language should bend to incorporate reality; otherwise the tail is wagging the dog. Language has enormous power to make our world, hence the sort of typical argument Eliezer discusses. But we should never lose sight of the fact that it is our tool, and any rules should be enabling rather than restrictive - clarity of communication is the goal.
This is why I advocate the adoption of logical language(s). Those in the tradition of Loglan, for example, share vocabularies and grammars designed such that context can be made irrelevant given appropriate sentence construction (some other ambiguity reducing features as well), and tools to easily make temporary (ie: until end of conversation) extensions to their vocabularies where the base is insufficient while generally behaving like natural language.
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Without concern for the proper use of words, language becomes useless.
A valid point, as long as you're careful that language work for you and not vice versa. The moment you find the expression of your concept being stifled by grammar or vocabulary or tradition, find another way. Invent a new word; define it using comparison, differentiation, pictures, hand signals, noises. Language should bend to incorporate reality; otherwise the tail is wagging the dog. Language has enormous power to make our world, hence the sort of typical argument Eliezer discusses. But we should never lose sight of the fact that it is our tool, and any rules should be enabling rather than restrictive - clarity of communication is the goal.
This is why I advocate the adoption of logical language(s). Those in the tradition of Loglan, for example, share vocabularies and grammars designed such that context can be made irrelevant given appropriate sentence construction (some other ambiguity reducing features as well), and tools to easily make temporary (ie: until end of conversation) extensions to their vocabularies where the base is insufficient while generally behaving like natural language.