There are languages like Aymara that incorporate evidentiality, that is, you can’t express a thought without also saying how you know it. This forces the speaker to be always aware of the degree of certainty of every statement.
I have a number of evidential categories available for use, as well as some relating to certainty, which I view as a separate issue (source versus certainty). But I hadn’t put any thought into making their use mandatory. There are certainly advantages to making it impossible to hide information by making the inclusion of some information carrying categories necessary. But it seems to me that not all possible information is going to be relevant to all possible statements or circumstances, and that forcing everyone to always include evidentials, even when they aren’t relevant, will carry a high price. There are probably aspects of speech other than evidentials that it would be advantageous to include in some circumstances. If the grammar requires that they all be included in every statement, then every statement will be overcrowded with irrelevant add-ons. Also, there’s the problem of enforcement. If, for example, you require that each statement end with an evidential, then what will stop irritated users from simply omitting it? If you create a system of grammar such that each of the add-ons must, unavoidably, be merged into the words, perhaps by some mechanism similar to verb conjugation, then how many people would volunteer to use such an inconveniently complex language? In order to be successful, a constructed language must be designed such that many people will want to use it. Only a few have reached that peak, such as Esperanto, and Klingon.
Also, there’s the problem of enforcement. If, for example, you require that each statement end with an evidential, then what will stop irritated users from simply omitting it?
In English every sentence ends in ”.”, ”?” or ”!”. You can’t simply omit those because otherwise a new sentence won’t start. I think it’s good for evidentials to end sentence’s in the same way.
Recently I develed a bit into radical honesty. Radical honesty proclaims that you say what’s on your mind.
However instead of saying: “You are angry”, you can say “I imagine you are angry”. The usage of “I imagine” makes the conversation much nicer. It’s part of what stops people practicing radical honesty from being assholes.
At the same time “I imagine” costs four syllables. The direct translation into German is even more clumsy: “Ich stelle mir vor, dass”. It would be much nicer if the language integrates evidentials by default.
The problem that I see with this is that people are basically lazy-brained. Even if a language requires that you choose a final particle that indicates evidentiality, people will just not use it. For example, if the written form of a language requires that a sentence end with ”.”, ”?” or ”!”, and each one is an evidential particle, then tomorrow someone on the internet will say “By the way everyone, I’m tired of doing all of this evidentiality stuff when I don’t need to, so I’m just going to write ‘_’ at the end of all of my sentences, and it doesn’t mean anything but that the sentence is over.” Within a week the convention will be adopted all over the world, and mandatory evidentiality will be a thing of the past. It might or might not be a good idea, but I just can’t see a grammatical requirement overcoming human laziness.
Many years ago an acquaintance of mine in college said “A system without an application is a useless ornament.” I believe that he was quoting someone, although I have no idea who (BTW, if anyone here knows where this quote might have come from I’d appreciate the reference). In the case of a conlang, part of the beauty comes from the fact of its widespread use. While I agree that mandatory evidentials are a tempting idea (I’d certainly like a language that has them), I don’t believe that they’d hold up well in actual use.
For example, if the written form of a language requires that a sentence end with ”.”, ”?” or ”!”, and each one is an evidential particle, then tomorrow someone on the internet will say “By the way everyone, I’m tired of doing all of this evidentiality stuff when I don’t need to, so I’m just going to write ‘_’ at the end of all of my sentences, and it doesn’t mean anything but that the sentence is over.”
Actually ”.”, ”?” and ”!” are illoctutionary operators. Sentence have a different meaning if you use a different one in English. Yet we don’t see anybody writing _ because he doesn’t want to specify one of the three.
When it comes to the sentence “You are angry” I don’t like the ugly copula. At the same time I still don’t write “You angry” instead to have less effort because I’m lazy. After reading Science and Sanity I started to accidently drop the copula from time to time and write “there” instead of “there’s” but the conventions of the English language still encourage me to not modify the language and write proper English.
In Chinese and Esperanto you can say “It rains” in one word. In English it would be easier to say “Rains” but that wouldn’t be correct English and lazyness is not enough to get people to make that change. .
While I agree that mandatory evidentials are a tempting idea (I’d certainly like a language that has them), I don’t believe that they’d hold up well in actual use.
I think you underrate the usefulness of evidentials because English doesn’t have them.Via Saphir Worf it also will get easier to think in evidentials when you have a language that does them by default.
In the case of a conlang, part of the beauty comes from the fact of its widespread use.
I don’t think you will get people to adopt a new language by focusing on the lowest common denominator. There’s no reason to switch to another language that does roughly the same as English.
Esperanto get’s part of it’s charm from the fact that it’s speakers treasure it. It’s the most successful conlang despite the fact that it uses nonascii letters. While there are nonascii alternatives, Esperanto speaker still value using the original characters.
Radical honesty proclaims that you say what’s on your mind. However instead of saying: “You are angry”, you can say “I imagine you are angry”.
Is it consistent on this? For instance, does “you are my friend” work this way as well? And if you think your car is running out of gas, do you say “I conclude that my car is running out of gas”? (There’s some nonzero probability that your gas gauge malfunctions, after all).
When speaking about radical honesty I used “can say” because you nothing in radical honesty forces you to use evidentials.
As far as my wish for an ideal language goes I think it’s good if the language requires evidentials.
When it comes to “I conclude that my car is running out of gas” it’s useful to distinguish the fact that you conclude based on reason, your intuition or because an authority told you so.
“You are my friend” can also mean many things. You can say it to mean: “I hereby declare that you are my friend”. You can mean “my intuition tells me your my friend. You can mean “based on reasoning I conclude that you are my friend”. You can mean “I hereby promise you that I will treat you as a friend in the future”.
The fact that English often leaves that unspecified can lead to a lot of misunderstandings.
“You are my friend” can also mean many things. You can say it to mean...
“You are angry” can also mean similar things (based on reasoning I conclude that you are angry, I promise that I am treating you as though you are angry, etc.) So that doesn’t really answer the question of whether the language is consistent on this between “you are angry” and “you are my friend”.
So that doesn’t really answer the question of whether the language is consistent on this between “you are angry” and “you are my friend”.
You didn’t specify which language you mean. I spoke about an example from Radical Honesty. That’s not really a conlang but simply a way to use the English language and not even one that requires you to use certain phrases to express yourself.
If you mean my conlang draft every sentence should end in a evidential and that goes for both of those sentences. Apart from that I don’t think that “you are angry” is a good construction. I wouldn’t want to have “to be” involved in that construction.
I spoke about an example from Radical Honesty. That’s not really a conlang but simply a way to use the English language
Sorry, I misunderstood. But I think the same question can be asked even if it isn’t a language. “You are angry” must be expressed using words that recognize that you are making a conclusion about someone’s anger. Must similar sentences about other conclusions be expressed that way? Or does this requirement apply only to “you are angry” while there is no requirement for “I conclude my car is out of gas” or “I deduce that you are motivated by friendship”?
I have read about radical honesty multiple times on the internet and didn’t saw the point of it. I only saw the point when I meet a person who actually lives according to the philosophy, even when that means that it makes certain situations more challenging.
The core rule of radical honesty isn’t: You have to say “I imagine”, “I conclude” or “I deduce”.
The core rule is that you speak the truth and when you judge another person you don’t hold the judgement back but speak it out. Empirically that’s easier when the statement is softened by “I imagine”.
If I remember correctly, Japanese allows “I want X” but not “You/He wants X,” only “It seems that you/he wants X,” the reasoning being that the speaker can’t read other people’s heads and can’t know what they want, only the external signs that suggest so. Is that how you language handles “You are angry”?
No, I have no problem with people saying that they know that someone else is angry.
I however would want to have a distinction between whether the claim is that the person has the feeling, the emotion or the moot of anger.
Serious psychology distinguishes those from each other and as a result I would want the language to reflect that distinction and not simply use “you are”.
I think the information transmitted at minimum would be: “I have the knowledge that you have the feeling of anger.” Currently that should take four sylables with 10 to 12 letters.
But it should be also possible with using an additional letter to instead say:
“My intuition tells me that you have the feeling of anger.”
My goal isn’t that language forces people to use a phrase like “I imagine” but that it makes it easier. I think that makes it easier to communicate with Radical Honesty without people feeling insulted.
There are languages like Aymara that incorporate evidentiality, that is, you can’t express a thought without also saying how you know it. This forces the speaker to be always aware of the degree of certainty of every statement.
I have a number of evidential categories available for use, as well as some relating to certainty, which I view as a separate issue (source versus certainty). But I hadn’t put any thought into making their use mandatory. There are certainly advantages to making it impossible to hide information by making the inclusion of some information carrying categories necessary. But it seems to me that not all possible information is going to be relevant to all possible statements or circumstances, and that forcing everyone to always include evidentials, even when they aren’t relevant, will carry a high price. There are probably aspects of speech other than evidentials that it would be advantageous to include in some circumstances. If the grammar requires that they all be included in every statement, then every statement will be overcrowded with irrelevant add-ons. Also, there’s the problem of enforcement. If, for example, you require that each statement end with an evidential, then what will stop irritated users from simply omitting it? If you create a system of grammar such that each of the add-ons must, unavoidably, be merged into the words, perhaps by some mechanism similar to verb conjugation, then how many people would volunteer to use such an inconveniently complex language? In order to be successful, a constructed language must be designed such that many people will want to use it. Only a few have reached that peak, such as Esperanto, and Klingon.
In English every sentence ends in ”.”, ”?” or ”!”. You can’t simply omit those because otherwise a new sentence won’t start. I think it’s good for evidentials to end sentence’s in the same way.
Recently I develed a bit into radical honesty. Radical honesty proclaims that you say what’s on your mind. However instead of saying: “You are angry”, you can say “I imagine you are angry”. The usage of “I imagine” makes the conversation much nicer. It’s part of what stops people practicing radical honesty from being assholes. At the same time “I imagine” costs four syllables. The direct translation into German is even more clumsy: “Ich stelle mir vor, dass”. It would be much nicer if the language integrates evidentials by default.
The problem that I see with this is that people are basically lazy-brained. Even if a language requires that you choose a final particle that indicates evidentiality, people will just not use it. For example, if the written form of a language requires that a sentence end with ”.”, ”?” or ”!”, and each one is an evidential particle, then tomorrow someone on the internet will say “By the way everyone, I’m tired of doing all of this evidentiality stuff when I don’t need to, so I’m just going to write ‘_’ at the end of all of my sentences, and it doesn’t mean anything but that the sentence is over.” Within a week the convention will be adopted all over the world, and mandatory evidentiality will be a thing of the past. It might or might not be a good idea, but I just can’t see a grammatical requirement overcoming human laziness.
Many years ago an acquaintance of mine in college said “A system without an application is a useless ornament.” I believe that he was quoting someone, although I have no idea who (BTW, if anyone here knows where this quote might have come from I’d appreciate the reference). In the case of a conlang, part of the beauty comes from the fact of its widespread use. While I agree that mandatory evidentials are a tempting idea (I’d certainly like a language that has them), I don’t believe that they’d hold up well in actual use.
Actually ”.”, ”?” and ”!” are illoctutionary operators. Sentence have a different meaning if you use a different one in English. Yet we don’t see anybody writing _ because he doesn’t want to specify one of the three.
When it comes to the sentence “You are angry” I don’t like the ugly copula. At the same time I still don’t write “You angry” instead to have less effort because I’m lazy. After reading Science and Sanity I started to accidently drop the copula from time to time and write “there” instead of “there’s” but the conventions of the English language still encourage me to not modify the language and write proper English.
In Chinese and Esperanto you can say “It rains” in one word. In English it would be easier to say “Rains” but that wouldn’t be correct English and lazyness is not enough to get people to make that change. .
I think you underrate the usefulness of evidentials because English doesn’t have them.Via Saphir Worf it also will get easier to think in evidentials when you have a language that does them by default.
I don’t think you will get people to adopt a new language by focusing on the lowest common denominator. There’s no reason to switch to another language that does roughly the same as English.
Esperanto get’s part of it’s charm from the fact that it’s speakers treasure it. It’s the most successful conlang despite the fact that it uses nonascii letters. While there are nonascii alternatives, Esperanto speaker still value using the original characters.
Is it consistent on this? For instance, does “you are my friend” work this way as well? And if you think your car is running out of gas, do you say “I conclude that my car is running out of gas”? (There’s some nonzero probability that your gas gauge malfunctions, after all).
When speaking about radical honesty I used “can say” because you nothing in radical honesty forces you to use evidentials.
As far as my wish for an ideal language goes I think it’s good if the language requires evidentials. When it comes to “I conclude that my car is running out of gas” it’s useful to distinguish the fact that you conclude based on reason, your intuition or because an authority told you so.
“You are my friend” can also mean many things. You can say it to mean: “I hereby declare that you are my friend”. You can mean “my intuition tells me your my friend. You can mean “based on reasoning I conclude that you are my friend”. You can mean “I hereby promise you that I will treat you as a friend in the future”. The fact that English often leaves that unspecified can lead to a lot of misunderstandings.
“You are angry” can also mean similar things (based on reasoning I conclude that you are angry, I promise that I am treating you as though you are angry, etc.) So that doesn’t really answer the question of whether the language is consistent on this between “you are angry” and “you are my friend”.
You didn’t specify which language you mean. I spoke about an example from Radical Honesty. That’s not really a conlang but simply a way to use the English language and not even one that requires you to use certain phrases to express yourself. If you mean my conlang draft every sentence should end in a evidential and that goes for both of those sentences. Apart from that I don’t think that “you are angry” is a good construction. I wouldn’t want to have “to be” involved in that construction.
Sorry, I misunderstood. But I think the same question can be asked even if it isn’t a language. “You are angry” must be expressed using words that recognize that you are making a conclusion about someone’s anger. Must similar sentences about other conclusions be expressed that way? Or does this requirement apply only to “you are angry” while there is no requirement for “I conclude my car is out of gas” or “I deduce that you are motivated by friendship”?
I have read about radical honesty multiple times on the internet and didn’t saw the point of it. I only saw the point when I meet a person who actually lives according to the philosophy, even when that means that it makes certain situations more challenging.
The core rule of radical honesty isn’t: You have to say “I imagine”, “I conclude” or “I deduce”. The core rule is that you speak the truth and when you judge another person you don’t hold the judgement back but speak it out. Empirically that’s easier when the statement is softened by “I imagine”.
If I remember correctly, Japanese allows “I want X” but not “You/He wants X,” only “It seems that you/he wants X,” the reasoning being that the speaker can’t read other people’s heads and can’t know what they want, only the external signs that suggest so. Is that how you language handles “You are angry”?
No, I have no problem with people saying that they know that someone else is angry.
I however would want to have a distinction between whether the claim is that the person has the feeling, the emotion or the moot of anger.
Serious psychology distinguishes those from each other and as a result I would want the language to reflect that distinction and not simply use “you are”.
I think the information transmitted at minimum would be: “I have the knowledge that you have the feeling of anger.” Currently that should take four sylables with 10 to 12 letters.
But it should be also possible with using an additional letter to instead say: “My intuition tells me that you have the feeling of anger.”
My goal isn’t that language forces people to use a phrase like “I imagine” but that it makes it easier. I think that makes it easier to communicate with Radical Honesty without people feeling insulted.