I've come up with the idea of a language which uses symbols that are interpreted inside a person's head for their full meaning. This way, language could evolve in order to express ideas that couldn't be expressed before. You see, symbols would be designed so that you modified them inside of your head in order to pictorially express a concept. There could be a series of dots inside of a circle and you'd reposition the place of the dots inside of your head. These pictorial symbols would allow for many complex ideas to be expressed in a much shorter amount of time.
I suppose I should start by addressing an issue facing current langauge.
I suppose I should start by addressing an issue facing current langauge.
Definitions are tricky because they can only be defined in other words. What if there were a pictorial language or part of a language which allowed for the knower to understand a definition, resorting to an image to express the idea?
We start by taking a symbol. Rather than only communicating an idea, this symbol is used to be directly examined in order to provide the context for many ideas. In order to be useful, this symbol would need to be combined with other symbols. You can't indicate a lack of understanding by the use of such a symbol, which makes it impossible to ask a question. Laying out information is much the same as stating it. Commands could not be given with such symbols either, nor could exclamations. I'm not sure whether I even agree with the concept of the exclamation, maybe in writing, but real speech carries so many emotions that the concept of particularly emphasized speech is a bit absurd.
When I think about it, the whole idea that words themselves convey most of their meaning with minimal punctuation doesn't sit with me. There isn't enough focus on and exploration of sentence purpose. However, perhaps it's simply difficult to distinguish between purpose and speech inflection, inflection and breath.
I've noticed that it's not wholly possible to distinguish speech correcting your quotation of somebody else from the quotation itself. In order to do that, you could have a special form of pronunciation reserved for that purpose alone. Unfortunately though, if somebody quoted you correcting your quotation of somebody else, the pronunciation would still be used like they were the one making the correction. There would have to be a special pronunciation for quoting the special pronunciation and so on ad infinitum.
Stanislaw Lem had an idea in Imaginary Magnitude where you can use language that foreshortens complex thoughts that would otherwise take more than an entire lifetime to say. I recommend that book to anybody who'd like to read it.
This post isn't really finished, but I realized that I can edit posts continually and have the blog be a continuous work in progress. That seems better for my purposes because otherwise I'll just wait forever hoping to come up with better ideas.
We start by taking a symbol. Rather than only communicating an idea, this symbol is used to be directly examined in order to provide the context for many ideas. In order to be useful, this symbol would need to be combined with other symbols. You can't indicate a lack of understanding by the use of such a symbol, which makes it impossible to ask a question. Laying out information is much the same as stating it. Commands could not be given with such symbols either, nor could exclamations. I'm not sure whether I even agree with the concept of the exclamation, maybe in writing, but real speech carries so many emotions that the concept of particularly emphasized speech is a bit absurd.
When I think about it, the whole idea that words themselves convey most of their meaning with minimal punctuation doesn't sit with me. There isn't enough focus on and exploration of sentence purpose. However, perhaps it's simply difficult to distinguish between purpose and speech inflection, inflection and breath.
I've noticed that it's not wholly possible to distinguish speech correcting your quotation of somebody else from the quotation itself. In order to do that, you could have a special form of pronunciation reserved for that purpose alone. Unfortunately though, if somebody quoted you correcting your quotation of somebody else, the pronunciation would still be used like they were the one making the correction. There would have to be a special pronunciation for quoting the special pronunciation and so on ad infinitum.
Stanislaw Lem had an idea in Imaginary Magnitude where you can use language that foreshortens complex thoughts that would otherwise take more than an entire lifetime to say. I recommend that book to anybody who'd like to read it.
This post isn't really finished, but I realized that I can edit posts continually and have the blog be a continuous work in progress. That seems better for my purposes because otherwise I'll just wait forever hoping to come up with better ideas.
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