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Unker Non-Linear Writing System

s.ai

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Re: Unker Non-Linear Writing System

#41

Post by tygrak »

saizai wrote: post #36
ShorsHammer wrote: post #8

Completely Offtopic: How does one get a single letter domain name? Especially with a premium tld, and even moreso for a personal blog it just seems unreal.

Anguilla permits them. I had to buy off a squatter. But Sai is literally my full name (I'm mononymous), at the time it was affordable to buy off the squatter, and the per year registration fee isn't too high. So I think it's certainly been worth it.

That's really cool! Both being mononymous and having a one letter domain. Conlangs are also really cool! You are a pretty cool person!

Re: Unker Non-Linear Writing System

#42

Post by saizai »

pmontra wrote: post #29
restalis wrote: post #16

After going through the phase of admiring this new and intellectually stimulating thing, I went on with an exercise of imagination about how it would look like for a society to have evolved somehow into using this at large. Each new word (or at least morpheme) has to have its own signature/ideogram that has to be learned and remembered. For a lexicon of any practical use that would mean thousands of ideograms. That f…

Words (nouns) should not be a problem, verbs maybe are. "A gives a to B" is set in the language if I understand it correctly. How to add novel concepts and interactions? There could be the risk of a reduced expressiveness compared to the spoken language which in this case is English. Anyway, natural languages had thousands (millions?) of years to evolve, this one is at the very beginning. I wonder, we don't have a na…

… or because of pure happenstance, i.e. it just didn't come up?

Extant natural languages (including dead ones) do not come anywhere close to coming the entire ambit of what could happen in a language.

My interest as a conlanger is precisely that — exploring the boundaries of what language can be, not merely what it is.

As for expressiveness, I think that, within the things we've gotten to, it's just a expressive as English — and actually more so, for the things that are natural to a non-linear or recursive way of thinking.

Obviously we haven't gotten to everything. The lexicon, and grammar, are nowhere near complete. So, yes, we'll need to make lots more to cover everything.

Though also, we deliberately don't make every distinction English does, and we make distinctions English doesn't. It's a very noob move to make a conlang lexically (or even conceptually) 1:1 with a natlang.

It took us several months to figure out a non-linearly-natural way to express "if", for example. A noob would have just chucked in a new glyph and called it a day. We had to rethink fundamentals (like the scoping of irrealis); the result, IMO, is far more interesting.

As for optimality, that has nearly nothing to do with how natlangs spread. You learn a language because you need to — economically, socially, or militarily — not because it's better.

And how they evolve also has almost nothing to do with optimality in any hackery sense. That's an entirely different, stochastic process. It has some tendencies towards eg simplicity, regularity, etc, but just as many against.

In any case, the result is that natural languages don't have teleology; they don't become "better" over time, just different.

Re: Unker Non-Linear Writing System

#43

Post by saizai »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #21
skoodge wrote: post #2

What a fascinating concept, especially this part: > We have only started to develop how to hold a conversation in UNLWS itself. As we currently have it, it's a very, very different kind of thing than linear atomic turntaking. Rather, it's a sort of ongoing mutual edit of a shared structure, where revision history playback (or live observation) expresses the 'conversational' tone expected by linear conversation, and t…

> I can't help but wonder how this would look like applied to instant messaging: We are used to seeing our conversations arranged in differently colored bubbles, but how would our form of communication change if we instead communicated on a collaborative surface where we could freely choose which color to use and where to add our thoughts? Sounds a lot like Google Docs. Maybe all this time that Google has been strugg…

You're describing Google Wave¹, which (sadly) was killed as unsuccessful.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave

Re: Unker Non-Linear Writing System

#45

Post by saizai »

smabie wrote: post #37
saizai wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Programming is very linear in all forms I know¹. 1. There's a start point. UNLWS has none. 2. There's a mandatory canonical traversal order of the text (the compiled instruction pointer, at base). UNLWS has none. 3. Structurally — i.e. even ignoring execution — it's mainly a tree, not a graph (parent class > child class > instance > function, e.g.). There are some parts that are directed graphs, like mix-…

The actor model is non-linear. Reading the code gives you almost no clue on the order of execution.

That seems to me to be more like multithreaded linear than non-linear per se.

There are multiple linear components, and it's not obvious how they emergently interact — but they don't quite have the interconnectedness and non-directedness properties.

(I think that it's impossible for anything that's time-embedded to really be non-linear, short of time travel, since time is so fundamentally a directed linear vector.)

It's certainly a related concept, and these are aspects of non-linearity, but to my view it lacks some essential Buddha-nature of the full thing.

Re: Unker Non-Linear Writing System

#46

Post by eterps »

saizai wrote: post #43
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't help but wonder how this would look like applied to instant messaging: We are used to seeing our conversations arranged in differently colored bubbles, but how would our form of communication change if we instead communicated on a collaborative surface where we could freely choose which color to use and where to add our thoughts? Sounds a lot like Google Docs. Maybe all this time that Google has been strugg…

You're describing Google Wave¹, which (sadly) was killed as unsuccessful. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave

Still wondering whether it was unsuccessful as a product or as a concept.

Re: Unker Non-Linear Writing System

#47

Post by saizai »

tygrak wrote: post #41
saizai wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anguilla permits them. I had to buy off a squatter. But Sai is literally my full name (I'm mononymous), at the time it was affordable to buy off the squatter, and the per year registration fee isn't too high. So I think it's certainly been worth it.

That's really cool! Both being mononymous and having a one letter domain. Conlangs are also really cool! You are a pretty cool person!

D'aww. /blush

Re: Unker Non-Linear Writing System

#48

Post by restalis »

saizai wrote: post #42
pmontra wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Words (nouns) should not be a problem, verbs maybe are. "A gives a to B" is set in the language if I understand it correctly. How to add novel concepts and interactions? There could be the risk of a reduced expressiveness compared to the spoken language which in this case is English. Anyway, natural languages had thousands (millions?) of years to evolve, this one is at the very beginning. I wonder, we don't have a na…

… or because of pure happenstance, i.e. it just didn't come up? Extant natural languages (including dead ones) do not come anywhere close to coming the entire ambit of what could happen in a language. My interest as a conlanger is precisely that — exploring the boundaries of what language can be, not merely what it is. As for expressiveness, I think that, within the things we've gotten to, it's just a expressive as E…

"natural languages don't have teleology; they don't become «better» over time, just different"

I remember reading about the dynamic of language evolution, where an influx of new (and language-wise uneducated) speakers tend to botch and thus simplify much of the existing linguistic constructs. Then there is the opposite effect, where once the group of speakers becomes more uniform and educated, people become more willing to adopt/respect language conventions and even go on looking for ways to express more nuanced distinctions and improve the language in general.

Re: Unker Non-Linear Writing System

#49

Post by saizai »

eterps wrote: post #46
saizai wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're describing Google Wave¹, which (sadly) was killed as unsuccessful. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave

Still wondering whether it was unsuccessful as a product or as a concept.

Can we even distinguish those in practice? AFAICT its main problem was being so general-purpose that it was hard to describe as a compelling use case.

Of course, I also don't subscribe to the belief that the popularity or memetic prowess of an idea defines its "success" except commercially. I thought it was a very nifty thing. To me, that counts as a success. Alas, that is not the metric used by companies. :p

Re: Unker Non-Linear Writing System

#50

Post by saizai »

restalis wrote: post #48
saizai wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

… or because of pure happenstance, i.e. it just didn't come up? Extant natural languages (including dead ones) do not come anywhere close to coming the entire ambit of what could happen in a language. My interest as a conlanger is precisely that — exploring the boundaries of what language can be, not merely what it is. As for expressiveness, I think that, within the things we've gotten to, it's just a expressive as E…

"natural languages don't have teleology; they don't become «better» over time, just different" I remember reading about the dynamic of language evolution, where an influx of new (and language-wise uneducated) speakers tend to botch and thus simplify much of the existing linguistic constructs. Then there is the opposite effect, where once the group of speakers becomes more uniform and educated, people become more will…

Another way to express the latter is that if something becomes too popular, upper socioeconomic classes will want to adopt something else, so that they can preserve a class distinction of "higher register" speech. Meanwhile, lower ones will try to adopt the style of the higher register, since it's perceived better. That's an endless cycle.

Same thing for euphemisms, insults, etc. And uniformity was far less common before mass media and centralized schooling…

Linguists have a much more descriptivist way of looking at language use and change.

Nuance is not a feature of education; focus is. E.g. AAVE (AKA Ebonics) is currently considered a lower class register, but it has grammatical distinctions that standard English doesn't (like whether an action is part of a pattern, vs a one off).

ETA: also, an influx of non-native speakers tends to result in borrowing of both words and grammar from their native languages. Not just in the development of creoles. What's "correct" is purely defined by consensus; if there are lots of new speakers, that's of course going to shift towards their preferences.

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