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[Hubris Incalculable]

Yes, this is my second(? third? I'm not quite sure.) linguistics thread, but this time it's different.

You see, I'm asking you to take on the mantle of creative linguist. I want you (yes, you! ) to suggest features (not words, yet) of the language, with an example, and anything you post will be taken as law (apart from contradictory sentences) - for example:

The word order is Object-Subject-Verb
Example: The axe Urist swings. Rock the axe breaks. Adamantium you have struck!

[TheBronzePickle]

No feminine-masculine separation. That just adds arbitrary work to learning the thing and it might actually cause a minor drop in sexism (not that our little language will ever be used).
Ex: Mary did its homework. Ron also did its homework.

[Eagle_eye]

I'd suggest Japanese-esque word order- rather than an established order, just have words that indicate the purpose of other words in the sentence.

A generalized example: Subject Subject Indicator Verb Verb Indicator Object Object Indicator would be just as valid as any other combination.

[Hubris Incalculable]

So then something like this:

Jane-subind starts-verbind the fire-objind. Extinguishes-verbind the fire-objind Peter-subind.

[Eagle_eye]

pretty much.

[Armok]

The language is text-only, with no sounds associated, and uses only non-alphanumeric ASCII.

[Hubris Incalculable]

come, now. really? that's going a bit too far, wot?

Anyway, you didn't provide an example.

[Willfor]

You had to know it was going to happen. Armok is not going to take it back either. He is more likely to take it further.

[Starver]

Question: is this to be a completely regular language (Esperantoesque) or more 'realistic' and thus with a certain degree of irregularity (tied to the more common words[1])?

And apart from individual cases, although there has already been a call for no gender difference, is there a whole slew of one kind of word that should have a different set of treatements (or give a completely new set of treatments to adjacent words)...  Anything from the -er/-re/-ir (regular) verb forms of French to the mutations applied to following words in Welsh, accordingly.


Even if it's purely and intentionally artificial, I'd avoid some of the artificial-language tendencies and go for particular grammatical changes, rather than constancy of verb, because this can give context and (by otherwise identical manners of presentation) different emphasis.  (e.g. "I'm running", "he runs", "they ran", rather than "I [currently] run", "he [partakes in] run", "they [did] run".)  But I can see arguments for not doing so, or making sure the context is always on the verb or always on the subject.  ("I run-now", "he run-does", "they ran-did" or "I-now run", "he-does run", "they-did run", as a literal translation.)

Note the examples above are terrible, BYGTI.


[1] And which words are more common might be regarded as different, according to the "target audience" of the language.  The verb "to fire photon torpedoes" might well be a common irregular verb in Klingon (although I can't remember if it is irregular) but (if it exists at all) treated fully regularly in other race's language.  But the "to be" equivalents do be.  Are.

[Armok]

Right, example.

"I ****ed your mom" becomes: "([^([>])], [], ^)"

[TheBronzePickle]

I rather think that would be incredibly painful to learn. Some humans are auditory learners, and a lack of associated sound is going to make them unable to learn the language effectively. Plus, no differentiation between punctuation and 'letters' is going to make any sentence have to have some alternate method to note separation of ideas and other important features.

[Starver]

I recall a book (no idea of the title, or publication date (<80s, certainly), but never mind) in which a kind of secret deep-sea "Captain Nemo"-like civilisation of scientists was discovered by the central character, previously surface-based.  (Or possibly he got too close and they effectively kidnapped him from his bathysphere.)  To survive at depth, hyperoxygenated liquids were used in order to fill the lungs and allow high-pressure living, the breathing reflexes were surgically suspended and as part of this there were no longer any ways of speaking.

This (self-styled) rationalist society therefore resorted to non-verbal communication and had got to the stage of abandoning speech, even in written form, in favour of a "circuit diagram"-like written representation of their typically complex ideas in a non-linear manner.  It was a "different for the sake of difference" concept, of course.  A direct counterpart to the unthinkingly unimaginative trope which gives us "All aliens speak English".  It was frankly silly, I suppose (to be honest, it had very little importance as far as plot) but it did occur to me as an interesting tale to retell, in context.


Back to the real world, deaf persons often learn signing very well (especially those deaf from birth), blind people learn Braille in lieu of normal writing (but see below) and deaf-blind individuals can learn their communicate with others through a suitably tactile variant of signing.  If starting more or less from birth, I suspect that almost any non-verbal communication method could be as effectively adopted as a "mother tongue", limited only by the parents' (or others') ability to themselves gain proficiency in converse, given their life-long habituation towards their more traditional methods.

As to the alternate methods of representation for punctuation, look at Morse.  The difference between letters, numbers, punctuation and 'meta characters' is (to the untrained eye/ear) negligible[1].  Dots and dashes, in whatever form they are conveyed, can represent such subtleties, of course, with a combination allocated to the desired item.  The same is true of Braille dots (which I do not know, yet am invariably drawn to examining such signs as I see in various buildings that I might visit and have them placed around[2], when I have leisure to do so), and not only do I not know enough to visually discern them (except by painstaking inspection and inference, each and every time), but I've tried to read them in a purely tactile manner[3] and just do not have the sensitivity.

And yet I am fully aware that the sightless regularly use various 'reader technologies' that are even finer (and dynamic) than these public signs, and some (like Peter White of the BBC, IIRC, or it might have been someone he was talking to about this, in a radio programme celebrating a special anniversary of BBC radio for the blind, a month or two ago) can read their scripts far faster than they are reading out loud, to rival many sighted people's actual ability with regular writing.


Not that any of this necessarily suggests a direction for the OP's requested language formation, but it justifies efforts in all kinds of directions for those that might wish to make them.



[1] There's logic to the patterns, I know, but I've no idea what.  And compare a "!" with an "i" in the regularly-written alphabet, with an eye unsullied by your existing knowledge, the basic "1" and san-serif "I" can confuse where context isn't clear, as well as such similarities of shape similarities between "5" and "S" and other combinations that help compose 1337-5p34k practitioners' communiques...  17 (/\|\| |33 707411y |\|()|\|53|V51|3|_3, `/37 |234|)4|3|_3!!!111!!oneoneone111!!!

[2] There's one place where it's obvious the sign says "Please press 4 help", instead of the "...for..." of the visually written part of the sign.  Then there's even a sign outside the WC (separately labelled as such) labelling "toilet light switch".  Which I always think is very useful for a blind person.  (There's no other signs on any other switches, so it can't be to avoid confusion with door-lock switches, emergency fire points, etc.)

[3] Already knowing where to feel, and I always wonder if there's a sign convention that allows a blind-person to zero in on such signs, or at least to rule out the possibility that (having found no signs) there is nothing just beyond their explored environment that they should have felt for.

[Biag]

That's a giant brick wall of good points, but there's something that's just cooler about creating a language you can speak, and it's fun to fool around with phonics and sounds that don't exist in your native language.

Speaking of which, I propose a dental approximant consonant (tongue on the top front teeth, barely impeding airflow; sounds like a mix between 'th' and 'v'). I guess we haven't decided on alphabet yet.

[Virex]

So then something like this:

Jane-subind starts-verbind the fire-objind. Extinguishes-verbind the fire-objind Peter-subind.

That coincides nicely with an idea I recently had. It started with the idea that you could have a default action associated with an object. For example, the default action associated with a with a chair would be to sit, so instead of " why don't you sit down on that chair over there?" you could say "why don't you chair yourself over there?"


That then led to the idea that you don't really need a separate verb if you have a subject, you can join them. For example "I hit him with a chair" would become "I chairhit him". This would of course necessitate the use of unspecified subjects in some cases. For example, if there's a chair and a sofa to sit on, you could say "Can I seatdo anywhere" (using do to indicate the standard verb), which would mean you don't care where you sit, while "Can I sofa anywhere" would mean you'd like to know if there's a spot free on the sofa. If no places are free, you'd get an answer like "I'm afraid you'll have to floor, all seats on the sofa are occupied".


That last verb is a "dangling verb", one that does have a subject, but it's not near the verb itself because are is in between. However, we can combine "is occupied" into "occupiedbe" (and similarly "have done would become donehas" et cetera). So you'd get an answer like "I'm afraid you'll have to floorstand, all seatoccupiedbe", or alternatively "sure that spot is free".


Now in that last case it's the question if "free" should be considered a subject. Technically it is not, but it behaves similarly enough that I'd say that a construct like "that spot freeis" would be correct in our hypothetical language.

Now there are some cases where this starts to behave funky. Take for example "I would have liked to see you do that", which would become "I likedwouldhave to yousee thatdo", but in this language a word like likedwouldhave would actually be a special conjugation of like, for example "I likewed", especially since it's a pretty common construct. This sentence also display that a subject-verb conjugation itself can be an object to another subject-verb conjugation.


Another example would be "I walked through the park, Baker Street and Apple street to get to you". Now first of all, "to get to you" is something that doesn't flow when combined, so that would probably be translated as "youmeet". The full sentence would become "I park, Baker Street and Apple Streetdo to youmeet", with the lack of a verb in park and Baker Street indicating that the verb used on Apple Street applies to them too. And Streetdo would obviously be to walk down a street.

[Alternatecash]

How about pulling a page from the Aboriginal's (figurative) book, and lacking subjective direction words? No left, right, ecetera, but North, South, East, West, Up and Down as absolutes.