I don’t want to sound disrespectful towards your efforts, but to be blunt, artificial languages intended for communication between people are a complete waste of time.
A word language constructed from scratch based purely on what the creator thinks superior would indeed fall prey to your criticisms, but there a third possibility between a totally natural and totally artificial language. For lack of a better term, I’ll call it a cultivated language. That is, a language built up out of real efforts to communicate for practical purposes, but with deliberate constraints imposed by the medium.
When language first formed, humans could mostly only communicate in a linear way, the linearity of communication using mouths and ears being the bottleneck. The introduction of writing systems could eventually have fixed this (through a visual non-linear language like saizai’s), if not for inertia, as well as the fact that most non-intellectual people would be less interested in learning a language that had no carryover to speech.
But now we have the technology for a project that would place constraints on how people could communicate and just see what happens. In particular, if people could only communicate in 2D diagrams on a website designed for this language cultivation project, they might end up with something like saizai is trying to design, except it would be spontaneous.
And if there is any merit in Ian Ryan’s arguments for a constructed language above, those insights could be incorporated into the constraints on the users to see how they play out. That seems to be the best of both worlds: a sort of guided evolution.
A word language constructed from scratch based purely on what the creator thinks superior would indeed fall prey to your criticisms, but there a third possibility between a totally natural and totally artificial language. For lack of a better term, I’ll call it a cultivated language. That is, a language built up out of real efforts to communicate for practical purposes, but with deliberate constraints imposed by the medium.
When language first formed, humans could mostly only communicate in a linear way, the linearity of communication using mouths and ears being the bottleneck. The introduction of writing systems could eventually have fixed this (through a visual non-linear language like saizai’s), if not for inertia, as well as the fact that most non-intellectual people would be less interested in learning a language that had no carryover to speech.
But now we have the technology for a project that would place constraints on how people could communicate and just see what happens. In particular, if people could only communicate in 2D diagrams on a website designed for this language cultivation project, they might end up with something like saizai is trying to design, except it would be spontaneous.
And if there is any merit in Ian Ryan’s arguments for a constructed language above, those insights could be incorporated into the constraints on the users to see how they play out. That seems to be the best of both worlds: a sort of guided evolution.