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An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

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Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

#11

Post by MBCook »

tomkinstinch wrote: post #3

The same thing happened to Blissymbols[1], as documented by radiolab[2]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols 2. http://www.radiolab.org/story/257194-man-became-bliss/

That was a great episode.

This has also happened with the language Lojban[1], which was 'forked' from Loglan[2] when the creator starting making copyright complaints so the community could maintain control.

Such an odd concept that someone could 'own' a language, but I guess if you created it I can see why you would want to.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan

Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

#12

Post by rodgerd »

MichaelDickens wrote: post #2

Ithkuil seems like what a language should be: as the article said, it is both precise and concise. It looks the way Esperanto ought to have looked. I find Quijada's effort deeply impressive. I don't know much about designing human languages, but I know how hard it is to design a decent programming language (see http://colinm.org/language_checklist.html ), and building a serious human language seems orders of magnitud…

> Ithkuil seems like what a language should be: as the article said, it is both precise and concise.

Language should be useful and expressive for its users. Human languages designed by the kind of people who prize simplicity and regularity above all other qualities tend to fail for much the same reason programming language designers are hurt and disappointed to discover C is still popular.

Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

#13

Post by lotsofmangos »

gamegoblin wrote: post #10
lotsofmangos wrote: post #7

I wonder how well Ithkuil can be represented in Ian Banks' Marain script. http://trevor-hopkins.com/banks/a-few-notes-on-marain.html

Ithkuil has well over double the number of phonemes as Marain, so the answer would probably be "not so well".

Rotation and reflection of the basic set extend the phonemes and can link together similar sounding ones in Marain, so I would have thought it would be achievable.

Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

#14

Post by dunham »

mchaver wrote: post #9
wyager wrote: post #5

Can someone list a few popular constructed languages (maybe comparing them to programming languages)? I'd only heard of Lojban and Esperanto before reading this.

Toki Pona is a minimalist language with a bit of a following. It has 120 root words and tries to build all concepts based on those. Loglan is a predecessor and inspiration to Lojban. Slovio is the Slavic version of Esperanto. Dothraki, Elvish (Quenya, Sindarin), Klingon, Na'vi are constructed languages from popular novels/movies.

One novel thing about Tolkien's languages: he constructed a root language (like proto-indo-european) and etymologies for them. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Etymologies_(Tolkien) )

Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

#15

Post by jqm »

Losing control of a language seems to be standard procedure.

If this invented language were to catch on, it likely wouldn't be a generation or two and kids who grew up speaking it would start saying the Ithkuil equivalent of things like "yo dog, that's the rad shizaz!". Then, several generations thereafter grandmothers would be regularly using the word "shizaz" and they would have to put it in the dictionary. That's just the way it goes and is probably the reason we don't all speak the same language in the first place.

That being said, I've always been fascinated by the idea of a systematically created universal language and think the world would be much better place with one....if that were possible.

This was a neat article.

Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

#16

Post by Terr_ »

I think there's some research out there that suggests all natural languages have about the same information density, when you factor how two people in conversation will add error-correction or extra context to frame an idea.

IMO this suggests the bottleneck is something about our brains on a biological rather than linguistic level.

Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

#17

Post by voronoff »

For anyone who is interested in what an ideal language would look like, particularly in respect to brevity vs. informativeness I'd highly suggest looking into Terry Regier's work: http://lclab.berkeley.edu/

I worked in his lab on one of many projects showing that most human languages use a near optimal trade-off in various semantic domains (so far - color, kinship, containers, and spatial relations). His work also includes some of the best evidence for some language dependent forces in cognition interacting with some universal ones.

Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

#18

Post by micro_cam »

Terr_ wrote: post #16

I think there's some research out there that suggests all natural languages have about the same information density, when you factor how two people in conversation will add error-correction or extra context to frame an idea. IMO this suggests the bottleneck is something about our brains on a biological rather than linguistic level.

i think it is more auditory and has to do with out ability to error correct. Actually there is a really fascinating section in james gleick's "the information" on African drum communication which is essentially a much less dense version of spoken language since you say everything using a long sentence which essentially reduces the possibility of it being misinterpreted despite most of the sounds of normal spoken language are missing. Not sure if more scholarly work supports this idea but if this is the case then a written or thought language could certainly be denser...like symbolic algebra or python.

Re: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)

#20

Post by godarderik »

Terr_ wrote: post #16

I think there's some research out there that suggests all natural languages have about the same information density, when you factor how two people in conversation will add error-correction or extra context to frame an idea. IMO this suggests the bottleneck is something about our brains on a biological rather than linguistic level.

According to a study published several years ago, mainstream languages seem to operate on an information density/speed tradeoff [1].The authors found that languages that are spoken faster seem to encode less information per syllable than those uttered at a slower pace.

This does seem to suggest that biology may be the limiting role in controlling the rate at which humans convey information. Indeed, the language mentioned in the article seems almost laughably cryptic and dense. However, I feel that the limitation of the mentioned study results from the fact that it treats information on a relatively limiting per syllable basis. Quijada seems to suggest that an artificially constructed language has the ability to incorporate all the implicit meanings of a phrase that are left unsaid in normal conversation.

Ultimately, while Quijada's project seems quite unlikely to catch on among those who are not fringe pseudoscientists, it poses interesting philosophical questions about the nature of speech and communication and perhaps earns its title as a "conceptual-art project."

[1] http://rosettaproject.org/blog/02012/mar/1/language-speed-vs...

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