Hi,
I’m a middle-aged computer scientist/philosopher, who specialized in artificial intelligence and machine learning back in the stone age when I was getting my degrees. Since then I’ve done a bit of work in probabilistic simulations and biologically inspired methods of problem solving, mostly for industry. I’ve recently finished writing a book about politics, although God knows if I’ll ever sell a copy. Now I’m into a bit of everything. Politics. Economics.
I came here looking for input into a conlang project that I’m working on. Basically it involves the old Sapir-Whorf/Eprime/Loglan dream of creating a language that’s better suited for rational cognition than English, and I’m looking for linguistic mechanisms that might aid in this and that need to be built in from the bottom up (since surface mechanisms can be added later). I already know of the three conlangs mentioned above, although I don’t speak them, so I’m looking for ideas that aren’t contained therein, or that if they are might have been missed by a person without a deep knowledge of the languages. I did a search of the archives here and saw some discussion around this general topic, but nothing of immediate use, although I could easily have missed something.
All ideas welcome.
Since other replies are drifting in this direction, I’ll reply to my own post with a comment about Heinlein’s fictional conlang Speedtalk, to which Ithkuil has been compared. Like a lot of people, it was one of the ideas that got me interested in conlangs. But after a bit of research I concluded that it wasn’t a fruitful direction to head in. I ran into some research in which the rate of information transmission of various natural languages was compared. It turns out that in languages that are spoken faster, as measured in phonemes per second, the information carrying content, measured in bits per phoneme, is smaller. The result is that you really don’t seem to get a lot of bang for your buck by monkeying around with your language design to try to increase the rate of information transmission. The bottleneck at the high end seems to be in the processing capacity of the brain, not the structure of the language.