Comment on What if programmers rewrote the English language?
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 3 days ago
There already are plenty of conlangs (constructed languages). The main thing that differentiates them from natural languages is the fact that their grammar generally doesn’t have any exceptions (irregular verbs or nouns). It would be possible to create such a language based on the grammar and vocabulary of English.
The only conlang I’m proficient in is Esperanto, which definitely works very well for practical communication. One cool feature about Esperanto is the system of prefixes and suffixes that acts as a vocabulary shortcut, for example the word for “cold” is just “un-warm” (varma / malvarma), or the word for “school” is just “learning-place” (lerni / lernejo). The language you’re imagining would likely also consist of words like “unwarm” and “learnery”.
Meanwhile I don’t think the length of (root) words needs to be especially short. Studies have found that all languages transmit information at approximately the same rate, which is why Spanish with its relatively long words seems to be spoken so fast. Human brain capacity is a limiting factor for things like that.
Studies have found that all languages transmit information at approximately the same rate
Is this only true in speech? Japanese as an example is much more dense in text than English and can convey more information in fewer written characters.
But, those characters take longer to write and often have multisyllabic pronunciation, so speech would be unaffected.
Yes, of course I’m talking about spoken language. Of course if English were written in kanji we would need fewer characters to express the same information, but it wouldn’t change the spoken language at all.
(I remember learning the following graphical user interface design rule: switch your application to Spanish or Portuguese to check whether UI messages still fit in the boxes you’ve put them in. Spanish and Portuguese are the common languages that need the most characters per unit of information.)
This recently came up for LLM coding tools:
Toki Pona specifically makes me think of overly verbose programming languages. With limited ~120 word vocabulary, describing things can be lengthy. Orange pet cat would be something like “good animal of house and of red yellow”.
henfredemars@lemdro.id 2 days ago
I came here looking for Esperanto and was not disappointed.
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
I
use Archspeak Esperanto btw