Meditations

[Rooster5man]

I used to correct other people's grammar, mostly on Fan Fiction, then I realized it's sort of pointless. I don't know if I have any pet peeves really, I can be a calm person.

[Redafro]

I can't stand lazy and imprecise products. If you make something, I want to see the best thing you can make, not the least you can get away with.

And yet grammar doesn't fall into this for me because it is just a set of arbitrary rules collected unlogically and unplanned over time. Ah! Just realized why I get annoyed WITH grammer: see the statement above. We didn't plan it, it is just the least society can do.

[Anteroinen]

Hmm, would you then be a supporter of highly regular auxiliary languages, created for use, like Esperanto (although I know it has it's silly problems too, it is the best known example)? Ever heard of Ithkuil?

EDIT: Ithkuil – Wikipedia
EDIT2: For a more in-depth description: http://ithkuil.net/

[The Abacus]

Interesting... I've never heard of it till now though.

[Vurn]

Grammar certainly is my *pet peeve*.
And about that Ithkuil language, it's not like anybody can even really learn to use it fluently.

[Anteroinen]

And about that Ithkuil language, it's not like anybody can even really learn to use it fluently.

Well, yeah, but that is partially due to the consonant roots and complex derivational patterns. The language is very, very able to express things that English really can, but doesn't because:

hruštrul-lyö’ň ˉhničhâçtàu’watkwöu​​​​​​

Means, approximately:

‘…despite presumably being on the verge, contrary to the allegation, of just so happening to want to succeed in maybe ordering a periodic return to the honorable practice of superlative architecture for others to follow by example.’

That is the ideal behind Ithkuil, in which it succeeds, but obviously you could do that with suffixes, but that'd be a really longwinded language.

[Redafro]

Wow, that is really interesting. No, I'm practical while idealistic. (I suppose I mean that I aim at the idealistic but know not only am I too limited to reach it, but that I have to make practical considerations that are quite contrary at times to my ideology.) So I realize if we are going to have something like an ideal, logically consistent language it will have to be something we evolve towards.

If we were to have a logically accurate language, one of my first steps would be to start an logically interwoven dictionary that is not in alphabetical order but in order from terms used to define "fundamental" world view structures, and outward to things that "just happen to be so," like trees and fist fights. (Actually, call me crazy, but I'm doing this. ) But it would be awesome to see a logically consistent spelling system at least.

The thing that is most debatable to me is whether to use a language which is concise and simple, concise and complex, or something more like English which is not concise but is complex and thus has a lot of versatility in use and expression. Or could you have a language that was capable of both?

[Anteroinen]

Wow, that is really interesting. No, I'm practical while idealistic. (I suppose I mean that I aim at the idealistic but know not only am I too limited to reach it, but that I have to make practical considerations that are quite contrary at times to my ideology.) So I realize if we are going to have something like an ideal, logically consistent language it will have to be something we evolve towards.

Well, that is if we want to all be natives in it, but if something (found to be logical by all linguistic standards, blah blah) is taught in schools all across the world, we would get a functioning auxlang. In transition towards a natural language any auxiliary language will be broken down a bit though, so the perfect nature of it will be unlikely to prevail.

If we were to have a logically accurate language, one of my first steps would be to start an logically interwoven dictionary that is not in alphabetical order but in order from terms used to define "fundamental" world view structures, and outward to things that "just happen to be so," like trees and fist fights. (Actually, call me crazy, but I'm doing this. ) But it would be awesome to see a logically consistent spelling system at least.

Trying to order things semantically is pretty hard as fields frequently overlap. It might be good for learning purposes though, but finding them would be horrendous, if you weren't well versed in the system.

As for spelling, the best I could offer is using IPA. English isn't as terrible as many believe, but it isn't very good on having a single sound or sound combination for a single letter or letter combination. Many languages do have much better orthographies, Finnish and Spanish are often called such, but they aren't perfect either. Both orthographies totally dismiss sandhi phenomena which in Finnish causes gemination (double consonant) in word boundaries and in Spanish mutates certain sounds. Finnish and Spanish both also have oddball exceptions, mostly via loanwords. IPA isn't as ambiguous.

The thing that is most debatable to me is whether to use a language which is concise and simple, concise and complex, or something more like English which is not concise but is complex and thus has a lot of versatility in use and expression. Or could you have a language that was capable of both?

Well, agglutinating languages i.e ones that use distinct morphemes for different things (say the English -ness, but also the genitive 's and the archaic second person -st) and you can stack them to create interesting collages of meaning. Obviously such morphemes are optional in most cases, moreso if you also have a variety of prepositions like English, but it varies on language to language basis.

Take Finnish taloissammekohan, which is indeed a single word (albeit not a terribly normal one) from the morphemes: talo + i + ssa + mme + ko + han, which in order indicate stem, plurality, location, possessor, question and doubt. The word means: (I wonder) if in our houses. This is pretty concise (as concise you can get without something like semantically significant umlaut phenomena). You could say the same in many different ways, like "Onkohan meidän monessa talossa." which is basically the same. Han is the only suffix I don't have a good independent equivalent for.

I don't know if you can even have a simple language per se. All languages should be able to somehow describe the same things, even if it isn't always ideal. Not all languages have grammatical number even i.e the same word means a cat or cats. You can still say one cat, two cat, three cat, etc. If you truly try to go for simple talk it will just gather weird compound patterns, I'd assume. Like knowledge might be thing-in-mind-always or something.

[WorldisQuiet5256]

Wow, that is really interesting. No, I'm practical while idealistic. (I suppose I mean that I aim at the idealistic but know not only am I too limited to reach it, but that I have to make practical considerations that are quite contrary at times to my ideology.) So I realize if we are going to have something like an ideal, logically consistent language it will have to be something we evolve towards.

If we were to have a logically accurate language, one of my first steps would be to start an logically interwoven dictionary that is not in alphabetical order but in order from terms used to define "fundamental" world view structures, and outward to things that "just happen to be so," like trees and fist fights. (Actually, call me crazy, but I'm doing this. ) But it would be awesome to see a logically consistent spelling system at least.

The thing that is most debatable to me is whether to use a language which is concise and simple, concise and complex, or something more like English which is not concise but is complex and thus has a lot of versatility in use and expression. Or could you have a language that was capable of both?

Reality is a story the mind tells itself.
An Artificial structure conjured into being by the calcium exchange of a million synaptic firing's.
A truth so strange it can only be lied unto existence.
And our mind CAN lie.
Never doubt it...

There are moments when I almost see the underlying grammar of this place.
An impossibility, some mad Architect's opus-
A relic from an Age that can never could have been.
It's a metastasized amalgam of of add-ons,
additions and appropriations,
building itself out of itself.

Beautiful and Terrible-
And like anything cloned from a cancer cell,
Probably immortal.

[Oleander]

Okay so, a lot of people here have been complaining about the state of the forum and I don't think that's unwarranted at all. I myself left for a while because I wasn't having fun here, but I came back because I think I might be able to help a little bit and it also makes me nostalgic sometimes. Most of these would work better with Mat's intervention but if we as a community agreed to follow these rules it would work exactly the same.

First of all, the most important thing we need to do is stop posting on all of the spam threads except one of them. We have like 5 of them and almost all of the posts on general discussion are on those several threads, where they amount to mostly fluff. There's not really any substance to the majority of the discussion here and that's because substance-less conversation is *promoted*. But if we got rid of the 'empty discussion' threads, it would be a different situation. It's fine to do that stuff every once in a while but there is too much of it right now. Also if we are going to keep one, we should not have posts on it *at all* that consist of nothing more than gibberish, lists of smileys, etc. They should be conversations about topics not big enough to warrant their own threads, and not non-sequiturs that don't go any farther than a few replies of "what?" If we could all agree on this, I think we could just get Mat to lock/delete them all (except Off Topic itself, I suppose). There's nothing wrong with a little bit of chatter, but it shouldn't be the centerpiece. It should be a bonus on the side. If we had threads that were made out of thought-provoking topics, and they were successful and active, people would have something to be excited to come here for. There'd be an incentive to participate.

On a similar line, I think we should have less provisions against allowing debate. There's nothing wrong with it, and the only argument that's been offered is that debates can often be about sensitive topics, and people can get upset. That's true, but I don't think it's an acceptable reason--it doesn't suggest that debates are bad, it suggests that the community is excessively immature. We should be able to trust each other to talk about important things, and ideally, in a debate one or more of the sides of the argument would learn at least one thing by the end. There's a lot to be gained from the activity but it is all but non-existent in this forum, while being ubiquitous in literally every other community I've seen that allows off topic discussion at all. I think we're all able to handle mature discussion, and if one of us isn't, they could figure out pretty quickly.

These are all the thoughts I have on the topic that are particularly important, I suppose. What do you all think?