I agree, although GIF is rather inefficient, and there are forums that forbid the posting of GIFs in favor of better formats like WEBM. I support the addition of WEBM support to LW.
Zmavli Caimle
Karma: 42
Why I want to make a logical language
Phonology | Sekko
It’s Good Enough—A Party Game
There is also r/TheMotte, which formed from a schism in r/slatestarcodex. It mostly discusses culture war issues. The reason they split is that Scott was getting concerned that culture war discussion in his subreddit would attract the Eye of Sauron, which is why he asked people to make a new subreddit to discuss culture war (and also made it such that culture war discussion was now prohibited in r/slatestarcodex). Recently, however, the Reddit admins have been making moves to potentially ban the subreddit, so they are thinking about moving elsewhere.
Most of their content is centered on the Culture War Roundup thread, which refreshes weekly. Several posts are made per day.
Your links are broken and lead me to an “onboarding” page. The links when I use the original page on Blogger do, however.
English is the current “language Z” currently, but I agree that the language Z could be better. Are you planning on designing an IAL? I only do loglangs, so I can’t help (or help to a meaningful degree), but I’m interested in reading your plans if you do have plans.
Possible typo: “Being smart causes work-inhibiting disability.” given that the chart you then show says the opposite.
Hm, you’re right about the apostrophe. Toaq and Eberban use the apostrophe for the glottal stop. Lojban uses the period. What other glyph do you suggest?
x? Of the letters in the English alphabet, the following are not used by Sekko:j f v w x.
In truth, the phonology is unimportant for making a loglang. For making an artlang or an auxlang (auxillary language), phonology is very important—but not for loglangs. It’s more of an aesthetic choice. Also, I’m not very good at phonology. I used to have a loglang partner who co-created the language with me, but she left early on because of mental health issues.
Conlang making is weird because it’s less “design” and more like...feeling what feels right. There are certain things that seem correct and certain things that feel wrong based on which elements you’ve put down previously. You “fix” some points, and the rest of the design falls into place. In that sense, it’s more like discovery. I’ll tell you a little history about Sekko’s phonology, though.
Sekko originally had a Finnish-esque phonology. Voicing distinction on plosives and affricates (we had tʃ dʒ), no voicing distinction on fricatives. At that time, we also had the labiodental fricative f. Vowel and consonant length distinction were already present. The approximants j w were treated as separate consonants and not treated as diphthong allophones—diphthongs were instead pronounced with hiatus. The palatal nasal ɲ was also a separate consonant and not an allophone.
There was no voicing distinction on fricatives because we didn’t want a v-w distinction (and because Finnish didn’t have it either, but we soon stopped caring about faithfulness to a Finnish-esque phonology. Now it’s more of a weird mix of Japanese and Mandarin because of the labialization and palatization of consonants).
Now, this was all fine, except that I didn’t like how diphthongs had to be pronounced with hiatus. It’s much better to permit them to be said with glides. That entailed removing j w as true consonants.
I didn’t like that we had no ʒ but we had dʒ. The labial fricative was removed, and voicing distinction for fricatives permitted.
Because consonants can be palatized now, we had a tj tʃ distinction (think of English “tube”). I didn’t like this, so the affricates also lost their status as true consonants and became allophones.
Now there was less reason to remove ʃ and ʒ (I actually might re-add them). It’s the same situation as before, where there was a sj ʃ ʃj distinction. I didn’t like that very much, so the post-alveolar fricatives had to go.
You’re right! I totally forgot to talk about monoparsing. I really shouldn’t have missed that.
I don’t like the design choices that Lojban and Toaq made. The latter much less so, but there are still aspects I dislike. I wanted to see if I could, if not do better, at least go in a different direction. It’s why I use Livagian or Eberbanian style grammar with no “main verb”, and use agglutinative morphology rather than analytic.
You can post anything on LessWrong as a personal blogpost. From the LessWrong FAQ:
What can I post on LessWrong? Posts on practically any topic are welcomed on LessWrong. I (and others on the team) feel it is important that members are able to “bring their entire selves” to LessWrong and are able to share all their thoughts, ideas, and experiences without fearing whether they are “on topic” for LessWrong. Rationality is not restricted to only specific domains of one’s life and neither should LessWrong be.
However, to maintain its overall focus while still allowing posts on any topic, LessWrong classifies posts as either Personal blogposts or as Frontpage posts. See more in the post on Personal Blogpost vs Frontpage Posts.
I’m confirming that I’m coming. I might talk about the loglang I’ve been developing for about three months now.
Hello, I’m interested in meeting. I’ve been reading LW (and adjacent stuff) for a while now, but I mostly lurk.
The Google Drive link containing information about the organizations is broken.
I’m the opposite. My first two languages are VSO, so VSO ordering (function first, then arguments) comes naturally to me. Some languages are SOV—Japanese is the most prominent example. Don’t think I know of any proglangs with that form of syntax, though.
If you however put effort into thinking through the primitives of your language, you can actually easily make words that are understood without having to be learned specifically.
I highly doubt this is true or possible in any meaningful degree. There have already been several conlangs that try this—Lojban is one with its compounding system, another is Toki Pona. While it’s definitely possible to have compounds whose meaning is related to their components, each context a specific component is going to have to be interpreted in its own special way. Again, because of context. You’re going to have to learn something explicitly regardless.
In English, it’s not possible to construct easily a word that refers to “someone who has the same teacher as me” or “someone who reads the same blog as me”.
I don’t see how it’s useful to make words (i.e. separate lexemes) for these concepts, when they’re better expressed as phrases. The relationship of “parent-child-sibling” (in the genetic sense) is more fundamental than “employee-boss” because the former is immutable. You cannot lose your genetic relation, whereas you can separate from your boss. I also think it’s good that “coworker” doesn’t imply having the same boss—there could be no boss (e.g. a startup with two co-founders). Whereas there cannot be a child without a parent.
I’m more concerned with removing ambiguity from words (in the sense that words that enclose non-continuous spaces in semantic space have to be separated), than I am in trying to figure out how to divide it exactly. Many natural languages make distinctions (and not make distinctions) differently than in English—and in the same way, you can rederive the relation “has the same boss as me” via phrases using other words rather than creating a word.
No language that gets actually used in practice has people consistently referring to dictionaries to deal with new words. If anyone doing knowledge production has to interface with a dictionary-maker to get his terms approved, that’s widely unpractical.
This is a consequence of the languages being less mature than natural languages. Natlangs have had much more time to build up vocabulary.
Now, what’s the name for 7? You can derive from the pattern that it’s ‘me’.
I cannot see how it’s ‘me’. I can tell the pattern of the vowels: a e i o u. But how is it m?
Anaphora is super complicated, and I’ve thought long and hard about how to express them. Each loglang has its own ways of dealing with anaphors. Yes, you are correct that Lojban anaphora is poorly designed. There’s the ko’V series, the vo’V series, goi, the letteral series...it’s really bad.
Most people use a variant of the ko’V series. How it works is that you bind a variable to ko’a (or the others in the series), and then when you repeat “ko’a”, it recalls the bound variable. The extremely big issue with this is that it requires forethought. It’s fine when you’re writing, but when you’re speaking, you don’t necessarily know whether or not you’ll need to refer back to something you said before. You could simply repeat the words, and context plus good faith/Grice’s Maxims usually means you can safely assume you meant to refer to the same thing, but you didn’t state it explicitly. Very unloglangy.
Toaq anaphora is also not good. The new Toaq anaphor system is such that all arguments are classified into several classes: animate entity (really Toaq? Animacy distinction?), inanimate entity, abstract entity, adjectives, clauses, LU-clauses, genitives, personal pronouns and demonstratives. Each pronoun refers to the closest argument that fulfills its type—each class has its own pronoun. The issue is if you want to talk about things which belong to the same class, this type of anaphor becomes unwieldy. The plus side is that it requires no forethought.
I plan on having a variation of Toaq anaphors, which I’ll discuss in a later chapter.
Creating new words is something that all loglangs encourage. It’s more of an infrastructure issue—Lojban and Toaq both have community dictionaries that anyone can add to (Jbovlaste and Toadua respectively). People can then define new words to talk about what they want to talk about, as they wish.
It also saves a lot of effort on the part of the language maker(s).I distinguish between vagueness and ambiguity. Vagueness is when a word encloses a large volume in semantic space. This is totally fine, and most root words ought to be on the vague side. Ambiguity is when a word encloses disconnected volumes in semantic space. This is unacceptable and should be removed. Consider the vagueness of the word “animal” and the ambiguity of the word “set”.
On the same token English has student and teacher which is similar to child and parent but has no easy way to say the equivalent of sibling for the first pair that exists for the second.
Sorry, I don’t understand what you mean.
Yes, this is something that upset me with Lojban and Eberban and pleased me with Toaq. Lojban usually tries to make particle families have similar forms. This is bad because single-phoneme errors can cause misunderstanding, since particles in the same family would usually take the same places as each other. It’s best to have particles in the same family be phonetically far away, even if it makes it harder to learn. Phonetically-close words should be semantically far away such that even if point errors occur, context can be sufficient to correct it.
I thought very much about having a simple high-low tone accent system like Japanese or Ancient Greek. It would make SSM very, very easy and simple, given that I can just make word beginnings take the high tone and continuing syllables take the low tone (or the reverse). However, I’m unduly biased against tonemes, so I didn’t include them. Toaq is a loglang with a seven tone system, if you’re into tonemes.
Stress will not. I already have phonemic vowel length and consonant length. The only remaining differences possible are tone (which is pitch accent), and volume. I don’t want to have volemes (do those even exist?).
It didn’t work when I tried it again when I received your message, but I tried it again now and it’s working.