Yes, the important thing is the concepts, not their technical implementation in the language.
Like, in Esperanto, you can construct “building for” + “the people who are” + “the opposite of” + “health” = hospital. And the advantage is that people who never heard that specific word can still guess its meaning quite reliably.
we nonetheless find the concept of Simplified English to be somewhat aversive
I think the main disadvantage is that it would exist in parallel, as a lower-status version of the standard English. Which means that less effort would be put into “fixing bugs” or “implementing features”, because for people capable of doing so, it would be more profitable to switch to the standard English instead.
(Like those software projects that have a free Community version and a paid Professional version, and if you complain about a bug in the free version that is known for years, you are told to deal with it or buy the paid version. In a parallel universe where only the free version exists, the bug would have been fixed there.)
would you rather be in a community that excels at signaling, or a community that actually gets stuff done?
How would you get stuff done if people won’t join you because you suck at signaling? :( Sometimes you need many people to join you. Sometimes you only need a few specialists, but you still need a large base group to choose from.
As an aside, I think it’s worth pointing out that Esperanto’s use of the prefix mal- to indicate the opposite of something (akin to Newspeak’s un-) is problematic: two words that mean the exact opposite will sound very similar, and in an environment where there’s noise, the meaning of a sentence can change drastically based on a few lost bits of information, plus it also slows down communication unnecessarily.
In my notes, I once had the idea of a “phonetic inverse”: according to simple, well defined rules, each word could be transformed into an opposite word, which sounds as different as possible from the original word, and has the opposite meaning. That rule was intended for an engineered language akin to Sona, so the rules would need to be worked a bit to have something good and similar for English, but I prefer such a system to Esperanto’s inversion rules
The other problem is that opposite is ill defined depending and requires someone else to know which dimension you’re inverting along as well as what you consider neutral/0 for that dimension
While this would be an inconvenience for the on-boarding process for a new mode of communication, I actually don’t think it’s that big of a deal for people who are already used to the dialect (which would probably make up the majority of communication) and have a mutual understanding of what is meant by [inverse(X)] even when X could in principle have more than one inverse.
That makes the concept much less useful though. Might as well just have two different words that are unrelated. The point of having the inverse idea is to be able to guess words right?
I’d say the main benefit it provides is making learning easier—instead of learning “foo” means ‘good’ and “bar” means ‘bad’, one only needs to learn “foo” = good, and inverse(“foo”) = bad, which halves the total number of tokens needed to learn a lexicon. One still needs to learn the association between concepts and their canonical inverses, but that information is more easily compressible
Yes, the important thing is the concepts, not their technical implementation in the language.
Like, in Esperanto, you can construct “building for” + “the people who are” + “the opposite of” + “health” = hospital. And the advantage is that people who never heard that specific word can still guess its meaning quite reliably.
I think the main disadvantage is that it would exist in parallel, as a lower-status version of the standard English. Which means that less effort would be put into “fixing bugs” or “implementing features”, because for people capable of doing so, it would be more profitable to switch to the standard English instead.
(Like those software projects that have a free Community version and a paid Professional version, and if you complain about a bug in the free version that is known for years, you are told to deal with it or buy the paid version. In a parallel universe where only the free version exists, the bug would have been fixed there.)
How would you get stuff done if people won’t join you because you suck at signaling? :( Sometimes you need many people to join you. Sometimes you only need a few specialists, but you still need a large base group to choose from.
As an aside, I think it’s worth pointing out that Esperanto’s use of the prefix mal- to indicate the opposite of something (akin to Newspeak’s un-) is problematic: two words that mean the exact opposite will sound very similar, and in an environment where there’s noise, the meaning of a sentence can change drastically based on a few lost bits of information, plus it also slows down communication unnecessarily.
In my notes, I once had the idea of a “phonetic inverse”: according to simple, well defined rules, each word could be transformed into an opposite word, which sounds as different as possible from the original word, and has the opposite meaning. That rule was intended for an engineered language akin to Sona, so the rules would need to be worked a bit to have something good and similar for English, but I prefer such a system to Esperanto’s inversion rules
The other problem is that opposite is ill defined depending and requires someone else to know which dimension you’re inverting along as well as what you consider neutral/0 for that dimension
While this would be an inconvenience for the on-boarding process for a new mode of communication, I actually don’t think it’s that big of a deal for people who are already used to the dialect (which would probably make up the majority of communication) and have a mutual understanding of what is meant by [inverse(X)] even when X could in principle have more than one inverse.
That makes the concept much less useful though. Might as well just have two different words that are unrelated. The point of having the inverse idea is to be able to guess words right?
I’d say the main benefit it provides is making learning easier—instead of learning “foo” means ‘good’ and “bar” means ‘bad’, one only needs to learn “foo” = good, and inverse(“foo”) = bad, which halves the total number of tokens needed to learn a lexicon. One still needs to learn the association between concepts and their canonical inverses, but that information is more easily compressible