3.7 KiB
A simple universal language
Goals
We need a simple universal language for beings to exchange information with minimum overhead. Right now, humanity suffers from the lack of unification and unnecessary rules in the old languages that make humans waste so much mental energy to write things correctly. Old languages put grammar before the people. We need to put people before the grammar.
High-level overview
Language is a social construct. It's a set of rules, letters and sounds that people use to exchange information. The primary purpose of the language is to exchange information. The secondary purpose of the language is to convey certain emotional coloring. However, emotions are subjective so the same message can be percieved very differently by different people. Plus, humans have fought over definitions since the language was first invented.
From a bird's eye view, the problem of designing a perfect language is a numbers game. An optimization problem. It requires the correct cognitive model of the human brain and careful application of psychoacoustics and social engineering.
Basically, every phoneme has flow, "vibes". Some phonemes are percieved positively, some negatively. So building the language of Truth would require assigning truthful words and behavior "good vibes" while assigning words related to delusions and related behavior "bad vibes". After that, people who speak positive things are subconsciously empowered with good vibes while people who are engaging in behavior that is not constructive to building the Empire of Truth will get bad vibes, their brain chemistry will be affected and the language itself will do the systemic change of minimizing harmful thoughts and behavior.
Biggest language architects - teenagers
Of course, due to the authoritarian nature of the family system and social roles and definitions parents put on their children, teenagers are forced to rebel and create new language just to distance themselves from "old farts who know nothing".
Thankfully, they still need this new slang to be utilitarian so it has a certain degree of truth behind and is actually way more truthful than the language of the previous generation. As old delusional social constructs get destroyed by technology, teenagers help advance the language into a new, better future.
Hence why any change proposed should be able to pass the "teenager test". Can an edgy teenager rebelling against their parents accept our change to the language? If yes - good, if not - we failed and need to try something different.
Since this project is utilitarian, we'll start with the English language as the most common one already as a starting point.
Changes to the English language
Removal of capitalization
Sure, capital letters look fancy but that's pretty much it. And there are so many wars in the IT community over capitalization of things. This complexity needs to go. There are already plenty of smartphone users who just type all-lowercase when chatting casually because it just works. We just need to accept that.
Make pronounciation unambiguous
Why do we need fancy text-to-speech tools to know how to pronounce words we do not know? And why should our brains be burdened with maintaining the database of words and their pronounciations? So much wasted work.
It should be obvious how to pronouce everything just from reading it.
Removal of unnecessary complexity where it can be inferred from the surrounding context
Yes, in many cases our brain knows can understand the meaning of the phrase just from its surrounding. A lot of plural forms and tenses can be removed as the meaning is already obvious from the context.