Unker Non-Linear Writing System

Also, we use different colors per author in multi-author utterances, which makes it easy to spot another's writing.

Of course, unless you have an animated or history-preserving medium (which we assume we don't), then reconstructing the order of conversation might be difficult. That is entirely in keeping with our sense of what is "natural" to a non-linear language. The order in which something was written is temporal, and everything temporal is linear, so it's disfavored semantically & grammatically.

We prefer to challenge concepts like "conversation" at the root on such issues, rather than try to adapt UNLWS to afford them.

Sketching: we assume an infinite plane writing canvas. In practice, this means eg that one can use scaling to fit anything anywhere. However, we generally do not make use of images, unless it's purely quotative.

We do have e.g. graphs grammaticalized, though (inspired by Tufte's sparklines, but with a few more affordances from not being in a linear embedding.)

3d+: We considered that early on — and it's addressed in my essays on language design — but we rejected it as too under-constrained and difficult to work with in practice.

However, I've recently been thinking about a UNLWS-ish tactile 2.5D concept, which would use texture and a shallow height dimension — like a topographic map, not like an ants' nest. That's still in early conceptual stage, and not documented anywhere except a couple posts on CONLANG-L.

FWIW, I very strongly recommend Rick Morneau's monograph Lexical semantics of a machine translation interlingua ¹. It was a major influence for me, and is squarely intended for NLP model-internal usage.

¹ http://www.rickmor.x10.mx/lexical_semantics.html

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-ins and some RDBs. True multigraph structure is fairly rare. UNLWS is pervasively a fully connected multigraph with some directed edges (like irrealis).

…

Programming is, however, similar to UNLWS in that both are isomorphic to predicate calculus (e.g. functions, like UNLWS glyphs, are n-ary predicates). I think that's what you're probably catching on.

It is an important feature… but I think you're missing the more essential nature of non-linearity.

(It took me several years to grasp enough to start making UNLWS, so don't feel too chastised. It's a very difficult concept. :p)

I believe that complex circuits (as in wiring) and flowcharts do have the non-linear nature, though. Perhaps it'd help to think of those?

¹ I don't know functional programming or constraint satisfaction systems. It's possible those are different.