This seems like a promising direction. So let's say that by religion I mean a useful meme. The meme consists of a doctrine. That is, a collection of statements regarding human belief or action. A person infected with the meme lives in accordance with the doctrine. The doctrine is designed to cause a useful effect, apart from its own flourishing. The effect is caused by changes in behavior of the people infected by the meme. The effect need not be explicitly stated within the doctrine. This a broad definition of religion, as it doesn't require that ...
Unfortunately, I can't give a good definition for this except by example. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Daoism, Hinduism, Atheism. I suppose that it might even be possible to ask the questions assuming that science is a religion. The focus of the questions is intended to be on the engineering and social aspects, rather than on a question like "Should Atheism be considered a religion?" I understand that the vagueness makes this a less than perfect delineation of a topic.
You're all getting into some really interesting material here, and I think that it has significance beyond the scope of conlangs. I didn't want it to get lost, or ignored by non-conlangers, here, so I started a new thread for it, called "The value of ambiguous speech". This isn't to say that it wouldn't be great to see more discussion of the application of ambiguity to Ithkuil, but I didn't want you to miss out on the wider thread if your attention was focused here.
Update: ChristianKl pointed out to me that I should put a forward link to the ne...
Sounds like a good addition to my reading list, although I just looked at her books on Amazon and the prices on most of them are outrageous (I couldn't sell a book for $28, let alone $280). But with luck it might be possible to dig up a list of the basic primitives, with commentary, on the internet somewhere.
I understand the temptation. From the beginning I wanted to scrap parts of the alphabet and start over. From the pedagogical perspective, accepting the fact that children have to learn 4 versions of the same alphabet (capital and non-capital, print and cursive), makes me feel like I'm condoning torture. The only common English uses for the capitals are to set off sentence beginnings and proper nouns, both of which could be handled differently. And now that we're beyond the days of manual typesetting, the only justification for print fonts is that they'...
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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 ...
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 info...
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 t...
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...
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 inst...
Hi,
I'm a middle-aged computer scientist/philosopher, who specialized in artificial intelligence and machine learning back in the stone age when I was getting my degrees. Since then I've done a bit of work in probabilistic simulations and biologically inspired methods of problem solving, mostly for industry. I've recently finished writing a book about politics, although God knows if I'll ever sell a copy. Now I'm into a bit of everything. Politics. Economics.
I came here looking for input into a conlang project that I'm working on. Basically it involve...
I'm doing a little reading on both of them now. Big question: how to make them successful as social movements. I wonder if their elements can be modeled in a fashion similar to that which I did above. And if so, if there's anything that such an application can tell us about how to improve their chances for success.