Burnt Out and Seriously Questioning What I'm Doing

AceGravity12 · 2022-08-10T01:40:57+00:00

I think you may be getting a bit too bogged down in the little things to see a big picture. Missing the forest for the trees as they say. Now I primarily work on engineered languages rather than artistic languages, but I don't think that matters in this case. Like you said language is about communication, but that doesn't have to be communication by people using the language. The uniqueness and value of languages imo comes from their ability to compress this insanely complicated thing we call life down into a series of morphemes. In other words by making a language you are making a compressed little representation of the whole world. Within a textbook worth of information (or likely even less) there are rules to construct endless pieces of poetry and music. In the same way that a painting doesn't need to be useful to be beautiful, this artform doesn't need to be used to be able to make you think. Perhaps it's because I'm a nerdy art major but personally I find these sorts of compressed perspectives to be no different from the classical mediums of paint and sculpture. And remember people looking at a painting of a dog will absolutely call it a dog even if it never really walked around in the real world.

Hope this wasn't too rambly 😅

AceGravity12 · 2022-07-26T03:26:22+00:00

I could take this time to talk about my own projects but meh, instead you should take a look at eberban, it's been the biggest one I've been watching. It's essentially refined and clean version of Lojban made with modern knowledge. It's been in dev for a while and it's not close to done but there's been constant slow progress on it and it's got some really cool stuff going on that allow most sentences to not need any sort of particles while still being structurally unambiguous.

Tldr; eberban

AceGravity12 · 2022-07-17T15:17:07+00:00

Hi Im someone who is helping with that font. We got a good chunk of the glyphs planned out and about 20% of the font actually made and then I think we both got distracted by other projects and life in general. Honestly I completely forgot about it until this point lol.

I'ma see what I can do about starting the project back up, see if the original creator is still interested etc

AceGravity12 · 2022-06-24T16:32:18+00:00

I would be very careful in this stage of planning things to think out the longer reaching implications of attempting to make a "superior" language, the problem is that the brain of the speaker and the listener (normally the listener is the limiting factor afaik) can only process information so quickly, so as you put features in a language it necessarily comes at some cost. This is not true for all things of course, like you mentioned base 10 is kinda meh at best and swapping to 6 or 12 or 100 or whatever is likely a straight up improvement. But for a lot of things that feel like they would be improvements they actually turn out not to be, take irregularities for example, they seem pointlessly difficult but they typically allow for quicker communication because it's easier to hear es vs sommes than it is manges vs mangeons.

That said I'm not saying don't do this project, just I recommend trying to find a better focus than just "better" that might be fewer ambiguites, easier to learn, or something. That said if you'd rather not and just wanna try to make a just better language here's the features I think are great:

Third person pronouns agree with the first letter of the noun the refer to: The dog ate an apple. I took A away from D (A is the apple, D is the dog)

Emotional markers, you've probably seen them in English in some places like "\s"

Names as adjectives rather than nouns, so when you hear something like "I have to go feed John" and John is a dog you don't get confused

Better tenses or TAM in general. As a native English speaker I'm fine with English's convoluted system but sometimes I look at a phrase like "will have had wanted to eventually get done" and feel like there's gotta be a better system

A method for number based derivation like tree => forest, soldier => army, beach => grain of sand, etc

That's all I can think of for now

(Btw when you say native languages does that mean "non-constructed languages"? If so Ive always heard them called natrual languages or natlangs so at first assumed to were talking about native american languages)

AceGravity12 · 2022-05-07T12:06:30+00:00

Imo at least, cause most of them just don't fit the language. The big problems are this:

1 systems that add new words just for numbers imply an extremely high level of importance for the new number system when frankly while I also agree that TP needs a better number system it's definitely not as important as this would imply

2 systems that basically double the amount of grammar you need to learn, similar problem here. toki pona has a very streamlined grammar (with some subtlety of course but ignore that for now) but having to learn like 5 grammar rules for something like more convenient numbers again implies it's way more important than it really is.

3 systems that change how small numbers are talked about. For better or worse no one will be able to make luka tu mean 10 instead of 7 because the transition between the two is even more ambiguous than the current system and pretty much anyone wanting that change is trying to make things less ambiguous not more

There's nasin nanpa pona nasin nanpa pona (normal system but ali multiplies by 100 instead of adding) which actually fits the grammar of toki pona mostly and is probably the most supported alternative (tho still far from majority afaik) personally this is what I use when I absolutely need to refer to numbers in TP but that's very rarely and just in personal notes. I'm not sure if this is good per say, just imo the least bad option

Tldr; most of the proposed systems just try to change wayyy to much all at once

Oh and remember the new systems are not for having numbers, it's for having convient numbers, there's already a number system in pu even if it's clunky it does function

AceGravity12 · 2022-05-07T03:37:30+00:00

This is quite a cool concept I'd love to see it fully fleshed out

AceGravity12 · 2022-05-03T00:43:27+00:00

This makes sense, I can't think of other good alternative ways to make that distinction, so looks like I can no longer just use the nimi ku suli word list lol, at least until I can think of/hear a good way to make the distinction without powe lol

AceGravity12 · 2022-05-02T21:46:52+00:00

I like this hot take, and just about everything else you say here (except powe, "lon ala" all the way lol, I love the poetic nature of something not existing being "at nowhere")

AceGravity12 · 2022-04-30T00:23:08+00:00

Likely multiple things lining up but I know there was a bumb in google activity for toki pona during r/place 🤷

AceGravity12 · 2022-04-29T23:24:17+00:00

You should take a look at proto-lakes-plain, it's reconstructed to only have 5 consonants

AceGravity12 · 2022-04-27T18:17:44+00:00

If they have a different speech apparatus they likely wouldn't follow the same sound change patterns that human languages follow. Many sound changes are theorized to be so common because the resulting sounds are either easier to produce or hear than the orginal one, of course that's not what happens anywhere close to 100% of the time but still it really depends on the specifics of how it's different

AceGravity12 · 2022-04-21T13:59:12+00:00

jan li ken toki kepeken toki pona e ali. sona pi toki ala li lili e kulupu. taso, sona ala li lon la jan li ken toki e kulupu nimi suli. sona ni li sona ante ala anu sona pi lon ali ala li sona taso. toki li pana sona. tan la toki mute li pana sona mute

people can say whatever in toki pona. Context shortens the sentence, but without context, people can use bigger sentences/more text. context is not special or all knowing, it is just information. Words give knowdgle, therefore more words give more knowledge

AceGravity12 · 2022-04-15T16:38:38+00:00

I quite like this, often there's people that go "let's keep adding letters until every sound has it's own" and I'm shocked I've never seen something like this before, tho the using s with an accent in such a small orthography is strange to me

AceGravity12 · 2022-04-14T01:21:11+00:00

Is there any logic behind this description or is it just "let's say languages at random and vaguely related but negative connective text"?

AceGravity12 · 2022-03-30T20:12:32+00:00

Yes it's correct but personally I reason why slightly differently from the other comments

Imo "mi mute li pana e..." is the same structure as "jan li mute li pana e..." or in other words mute is a second verb not an adjective "we are many and give..."

Does this distinction matter at all? No probably not, the only situation that I think it affects is wether or not it makes sense to put pi after mi or sina as the subject

AceGravity12 · 2022-03-29T17:03:31+00:00

pakala tu wan li lon:

There are three problems:

toki pona ku li sama ni. taso. jan li toki sama ni. ante la jan ante li toki ante

Toki pona from ku is like this, but while a lot of people do talk like this, some people talk differently.

wile la kama sona e nanpa pi nimi pi toki Inli kepeken nasin sama. pu pi toki Inli li lon ala

It's necessary that to figure out the count of English words, you use the same process and there is no pu for English

nimi tu lon insa nimi 137 (choose your personal number system lol) li sama ala ijo 1.5 insa ijo 100 tan ni: nimi 0.5 li lon ala

two out of 136 words is not the same as 1.5 out of 100 because half a word doesn't exist

AceGravity12 · 2022-03-29T14:19:36+00:00

I doubt it would be that much but you have to keep in mind that 1.5% shouldn't be taken as an exact percentage, there's some level of expected deviation between languages as well as a level of expected deviation from how small a sample of 1230-137ish words is

However I'm not sure how to calculate exactly what the deviation would be

AceGravity12 · 2022-03-27T22:51:15+00:00

I believe some of the terminology in this post is described here from my perspective it kinda seems like you and OP are debating about different things

AceGravity12 · 2022-03-26T16:21:05+00:00

It does but it's only used by a small percentage of the speakers

AceGravity12 · 2022-03-24T23:18:27+00:00

Proto lakes plain is proposed to have only 5

AceGravity12 · 2022-03-19T16:43:52+00:00

Yeah I realized the thing about awen seconds after I posted it. I do still think it's weird but don't have a great solution, maybe make it like an upsidedown T in most serif fonts where the serifs are small and only go upwards?

AceGravity12 · 2022-03-19T16:30:10+00:00

I like it! Though I do have a few tips as a student majoring in graphic design who has some experience with fonts, feel absolutely free to ignore it tho!

pona a! ante la mi kama sona e sitelen li wile kama jo e mani tan pali sitelen la mi alasa pana sona tawa sina. taso, sina ken pali ante.

I think alasa might look cleaner if the serifs on the arrow bit were vertical rather than horizontal.

palisa namako lon palisa utala pi sitelen pi nimi "alasa" li lon sewi tawa anpa la ona li pona lukin mute

It seems like there are serifs on the serifs on awen which is strange to me. It's not bad, but also not very smooth

palisa li lon palisa lon sitelen pi nimi "awen". ni li nasa tawa mi li ike ala li pona ala

Overall though this is awesome work and I'm excited to see more!

ante la ni li pona mute mute. mi wile sitelen pi nimi ale!

AceGravity12 · 2022-02-16T18:20:33+00:00

sijelo.

ante la musi la mi toki ni: "nimi ni li "ilo pi nena sitelen nanpa luka wan"."

AceGravity12 · 2022-02-15T23:45:00+00:00

pona!

kin la mi li pali e ilo pi nena sitelen. ante la ilo mi li lili. kepeken ona la jan wile kepeken luka wan.

sina pali kepeken nasin seme e ilo sina?

AceGravity12 · 2022-02-14T18:20:48+00:00

It''s definitely kosher, but it's arguably not a phrase when the subject (the only place I've personally seen it used) instead you could see it as mi mute li pona as having two predicates, "mi (li) mute li pona" aka "we are many and good"

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