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Unker Non-Linear Writing System

s.ai

61–70 of 71 posts

Re: Unker Non-Linear Writing System

#61

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…

I can imagine that this 'formal' definition would evolve to an informal language, where things are simplified and symbolized into a new 'character' for which the meaning is generally agreed on.

See also: regional / cultural slang, internet / text speak. You can say "n00b" instead of "new person", or ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ instead of "idk" or "I don't know".

Re: Unker Non-Linear Writing System

#62
post #36

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 awesome, saw in the bio that it was actually your name too which was even cooler. I spent some time going through {X}.ai domains, surprised many are actually on sale.

Find it impressive because I always feel as though I missed out on the golden era of short domains long ago and that's clearly not the case.

Hopefully you hold onto that mate, it seems like a good patch of digital land :)

Really enjoyed reading through your other stuff too. It's great to see personal sites not so focused on one thing only.

Re: Unker Non-Linear Writing System

#63
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideograms clearly can work, and pretty dang well, as demonstrated by ancient China. Some phonetic representation would be nice too. Either way, you'd likely see common structures evolving into ideograms. Very interesting.

FWIW, we deliberately decided to have no phonetic representation at all, to avoid any linearizing influence. Yes, it would need a large number of glyphs. Not so many as speculated above, though — e.g. we have one glyph that covers communicate, say, tell, hear, speech (all senses), etc. (with some mix-ins for sensory modality); another one that covers give, receive, gift, sell, etc. Linear languages with European stru…

Re phonetics, this may not be your goal but I was thinking about it from the standpoint of potential wide-scale usage. In that scenario, you would want phonetics for handling foreign words, or for literally discussing phonetics if nothing else. I didn't see on the page how you handle narrative, but I can imagine handing phonetic descriptions the same way. Maybe "forward" goes in a circular pattern rather than "linear"? You already have sequences like that in the distributive construct.

Re: Unker Non-Linear Writing System

#65
post #20

This reminds me of the film Arrival and relates to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis [1]regarding how language affects our perception and cognition. It's certainly a very interesting design (there's a hieroglyphic electrical circuit quality to it), but it wasn't clear what we can infer or gain from this non-linear form of writing. I feel like non-linear thinking is naturally how our brains work (or has more potential to wor…

I believe that understanding relationships between units (objects, people, etc.) explains high intelligence, especially in autism, more than most average thinkers assume. People tend to fixate on the unit, and presume a relationship apropos between units. So, if we give core focus to memorizing the relationship then the unit, we may actually reinforce the neural pathways for both units and the abstraction between the…

Fascinating. Can you explain this: "X can be a function of X expressed as X=X(X++)."

This is my (incorrect) attempt to make sense of the equation: X++ = X + 1 (?) X() What does this mean? How can X be a function?

Re: Unker Non-Linear Writing System

#66
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, we deliberately decided to have no phonetic representation at all, to avoid any linearizing influence. Yes, it would need a large number of glyphs. Not so many as speculated above, though — e.g. we have one glyph that covers communicate, say, tell, hear, speech (all senses), etc. (with some mix-ins for sensory modality); another one that covers give, receive, gift, sell, etc. Linear languages with European stru…

I love this idea so much that I would like to learn the language. Is there a group or something I could join? Does anyone want to make a group? I'm sure we could work something out with an online drawing app. The possiblity of getting ideas out of my head and onto paper without having to linearise everything is very exciting.

i'd love a group like that!

Re: Unker Non-Linear Writing System

#67
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tracking: if you're asking a question or otherwise anticipating where the other will add, there are relatively few places to look. 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 ent…

> we rejected it as too under-constrained and difficult to work with in practice I’m imagining a conversation as a space containing multiple regular UNLWS planes, intersecting at certain [binding?] points. Such an approach would ideally leave dimensionality to the medium, language itself could remain under same constraints as before. A conversation plane would be viewed in 2D, but certain points could indicate connec…

I have two concerns with that, above the (major) technical challenges: 1. we wanted this to be writable using colored pens 2. if we add a dimension, we must add it for real.

#2 is to me the vastly harder problem. Just like in UNLWS, we always have to challenge our own assumptions in order to get a sense for what would be "native to" a two-dimensional written langauge, we'd have to do the same for 3D (or 2.5D). Merely slapping 2D planes together with some links would not come anywhere even close to a robust use of the medium, just like merely having English sentences branch off from each other isn't anywhere close to a robust use of two-dimensionality.

Fully 2D language is already an extremely conceptually challenging problem, at least to me. Hardly anyone has even tried. There are fundamental challenges, like "how do you tell a joke when you don't control the ordering".

I don't think anyone is currently able to do 3D in a way that would truly serve the medium - and the medium would need to be much better defined, since humans' inability to actually see anything 3D instantaneously (we see 2D with an imputed distance and assumptions about what the rest looks like) implies that there must be interaction-in-time of some sort (like, at minimum, moving your head or the object in order to see the whole thing). That's going to be very specific to the medium. Are we talking about arbitrary 3D disconnected polytopes, ants' nest casts, convex hulls, computer-manipulated 2D, VR goggles, ...? Those all have radically different affordances.

Simultaneously, it would trivialize problems in 2D that we have to deal with. E.g. in 3D, there's no circuit wire-crossing problem, whereas in 2D, Borromean rings e.g. have unavoidable collisions. It would be cheating to use 3D in some shallow way to get rid of that issue, without also dealing with 3D's own problems.

Design constraints are a good thing.

Re: Unker Non-Linear Writing System

#68
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, we deliberately decided to have no phonetic representation at all, to avoid any linearizing influence. Yes, it would need a large number of glyphs. Not so many as speculated above, though — e.g. we have one glyph that covers communicate, say, tell, hear, speech (all senses), etc. (with some mix-ins for sensory modality); another one that covers give, receive, gift, sell, etc. Linear languages with European stru…

Re phonetics, this may not be your goal but I was thinking about it from the standpoint of potential wide-scale usage. In that scenario, you would want phonetics for handling foreign words, or for literally discussing phonetics if nothing else. I didn't see on the page how you handle narrative, but I can imagine handing phonetic descriptions the same way. Maybe "forward" goes in a circular pattern rather than "linear…

We have absolutely no interest in wide-scale usage, let alone if it were to come at the expense of fully exploring what a natively-2D language is like.

Narrative is an utterly different thing in UNLWS. We simply do not have "stories" in the same sense as you're used to. The closest so far is that, rather than the reward/punchline/moral/etc coming from the ordering of things, it comes from understanding the whole, i.e. as an emergent effect of the gestalt.

We don't try to have things that aren't native to 2D. We are, if necessary, able to describe something that happens on a linear timeline - that's pretty easy actually - but it simply isn't the "normal" way to arrange a large utterance. We just aren't all that interested in temporal order. We'd be more likely to represent the underlying structural order, or causality networks.

We do have a quotative, and we've talked about using IPA if we ever needed to literally refer to phonetics for some reason, but so far we simply haven't needed or wanted to do so. (Not for names, either. Names are assigned in a manner that's native to UNLWS; we don't care at all about the phonetic form in another language. Consider ASL, which does this partially [for people who do have sign-names, and under extremely heavy contact with English as a dominant language].)

We never borrow foreign words phonetically. That is just as alien to UNLWS as assigning Chinese hanzi to a name based on their meanings or stroke #s would be to an English-only speaker. We only borrow concepts, and that's only after (sometimes radically) rethinking what those concepts actually are, underlyingly, and what an UNLWS-native perspective of them would entail.

We want to explore two-dimensional language in its own right. Although we do care about expressive power, we really don't care whether it's easily translatable to/from any other languages.

Re: Unker Non-Linear Writing System

#69
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 awesome, saw in the bio that it was actually your name too which was even cooler. I spent some time going through {X}.ai domains, surprised many are actually on sale. Find it impressive because I always feel as though I missed out on the golden era of short domains long ago and that's clearly not the case. Hopefully you hold onto that mate, it seems like a good patch of digital land :) Really enjoyed reading t…

Thanks! People are complex. It's my personal site, not a topical one, so it likewise has on it basically whatever I think would be interesting to put up. ;)

I'd welcome any feedback you have on the rest. Feel free to contact me directly.

Re: Unker Non-Linear Writing System

#70
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, we deliberately decided to have no phonetic representation at all, to avoid any linearizing influence. Yes, it would need a large number of glyphs. Not so many as speculated above, though — e.g. we have one glyph that covers communicate, say, tell, hear, speech (all senses), etc. (with some mix-ins for sensory modality); another one that covers give, receive, gift, sell, etc. Linear languages with European stru…

I love this idea so much that I would like to learn the language. Is there a group or something I could join? Does anyone want to make a group? I'm sure we could work something out with an online drawing app. The possiblity of getting ideas out of my head and onto paper without having to linearise everything is very exciting.

There is now: https://join.slack.com/t/ulws/shared_invite/zt-ewevpfmf-s1r3...
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