BEST Language

What is the best language and writing system?

How could you design a language that is the most optimal?
How could you make the language the easiest to speak and pronounce? How could you make the language the most consistent and intuitive?

How could you design a writing system that is the most optimal?
How many characters would you have? How could you make the characters the easiest and fastest to write?

I think if we ever want to be a truly advanced society, these are questions we need to answer. We also need to switch to the metric system.

Other urls found in this thread:

physioalphabet.com/
unifont.org/nahuatl/#example_one
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/¿_?#Translingual
es.oxforddictionaries.com/translate/spanish-english/enchilado
medium.economist.com/we-went-in-search-of-the-worlds-hardest-language-95a27c2cff3
jbr.me.uk/ranto/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difrasismo
twitter.com/AnonBabble

english

Yoruba

Yes. If written phonetically why not. But even as the mess it is today it is better than any hieroglyphic language. You need to be able to write any word that can be pronounced. Also, the posters question if flawed. A language by definition is expanding evolving and merging all the time, it is never set. No matter how good a language could be defined it would never be definitive because language is not definitive. English would be a good practical choice. It is spoken everywhere that matters, it has a small enough symbol set to be practical. It has an extensive vocabulary that is up to date.

you seem like you want to have a discussion.

To respond to your question:

I mean theoretically/ You would have to create a new language or modify an existing language with the goal of making a very efficient language.

English may be a good choice, but there are problems with english. Though/tough/etc. Those are inefficiencies.
Those are also very obvious examples.
Maybe a little more provoking is how could you design a language with the characters that are the most efficient to write?
I mean in the sense of taking pencil and paper and physically writing out a paragraph. How could you design characters that would make that process the fastest?

>I think if we ever want to be a truly advanced society, [...] we also need to switch to the metric system.
Advanced society in this world HAS switched to the metric system, OP.

>rephrases my statement

Good job.

Care to answer my question now?

>Maybe a little more provoking is how could you design a language with the characters that are the most efficient to write?
I mean in the sense of taking pencil and paper and physically writing out a paragraph. How could you design characters that would make that process the fastest?

Esperanto

gay flag, fag

Stop saying "most optimal". Something's either optimal or it's not.

Every language seems as easy to acquire for children as the others. There is no best language.

English. Romance languages are the best over all but there are fatal flaws in each and English has the least.

German
>New words are just 150 other words raped together
>You sound like a Nazi
>That fucking weird additional character

French
>Annoyingly large amount of written French vs spoken French issues
>An entirely extra and unneeded tense
>Basically every verb is fucking irregular and about 4x as irregular as that found in English
>6 endings same pronunciation or 6 endings with 6 pronunciations (why fucking even?)
>WAY too many silent letters
>Accented characters like a mother fucker

Italian
>Don't know shit about it
>Pizza, pasta, gucci, suck my ass

Spanish
>South America ruined this language

English
>More often than not there's the inclusion of one or two silent letters
>Written English and spoken English aren't that different if at all
>Irregular verbs usually involve the changing of a single letter (Run vs Ran vs Running)
>Often makes use of shit like "their" "there" and "they're" but matters not in spoken English
>New words spring up all the time and have 0 hint as to what they mean
>Ghetto shit like "ph" making the "f" sound

if there's anyone that deserves to be raped by a pack of niggers it's you.

More optimal.

what about the writing system?

>Maybe a little more provoking is how could you design a language with the >characters that are the most efficient to write?
>I mean in the sense of taking pencil and paper and physically writing out a >paragraph. How could you design characters that would make that process >the fastest?

physioalphabet.com/

This is an alphabet that uses elements pertaining to how the actual sound is produced in the mouth. It's visually descriptive. It is the arguably the best writing system (not this specifically but a good physiological alphabet in general is). Every other writing system is simply arbitrary, so it literally doesn't matter which one we use if we don't use a physiological one.

"optimal" would be subjective. There are plenty of constructed languages that try to be logical/systematic/intuitive. Many that are simply pieces of art rather than tools too.

what is most consistent and intuitive depends on personal opinion and native language. Learning English for a Germanic or Romance native speaker is much easier than for a Japanese native speaker. The concepts and styles preferred would correlate with native languages.

I made a small language recently, to play around with/learn linguistics concepts. I agree with your thoughts on the matter, we need a language that properly integrates and standardises into the world and our technology.
Ultimately I think anything will work, there is no optimal point to find. The most important thing is the language working well alongside and within our tech and the language being consistent as possible.

I'd say English. The retardation in the language is rather easy to get used to or doesn't really matter in the spoken language as much. No one in areas of America that matter will get salty at you for saying "I go shopping now" instead of "I'll go shopping now." Pull that shit with the French and they'll take your fucking head off.

What's the issue with Esperanto exactly?

also physically writing the language isn't so relevant, in 50-100 years very few people will be doing much writing by hand.

Anything I am about to write is not pertinent to our current time period, as we are not nearly an optimal global civilization yet.

Given humans ability to speak language through biological functions, I would think that that would be at the core of this optimal language - the absolute clearest and efficient use of biological functions. As for exactly that would be, I believe actual research would have to be done or utilized to see exactly what muscles can strengthen the fastest and be the most efficient and clearest, most importantly in human young (as the learning of the language should be very fast). Beyond the ease of learning the language at a young age (it being most efficiently spoken, etc.), the written part of the language would follow much of the criteria of the spoken one. It would have to be unambiguously clear, quick to be learned and quick to write with. Though, what I take from this prompt is that you would like to keep the common notion of what a written language is, that is it has to have an alphabet, be written by hand, be appropriately scaled, and has to be representable in several cognitive dimensions (the physical world (as written language is), the computer world, and others bound to come). The alphabet of this language would be short enough to not have less often used letters than most (as in no underused letters, like in English they would be 'Z', 'X', etc.), and long enough to be able to house symbols that can be combined together to form very specific grammatical structures. The grammar of such a language would be deeply connected with both the oral and written parts, as efficient grammatical structures would have to be produced and ingrained in physical pronunciation, alphabet usage, and with the use of analysis and study of grammar and its use in language.

This is a wonderfully difficult question to answer. Though for future humans, I would think, written language would not follow any of the conventions we have today. Its medium would be future technology based, which would allow for an intricate and not yet understood mode of communication, not hindered by alphabets or physical ability. I was not able to answer this question satisfactorily. Maybe I could attempt another answer if you would define more parameters, such as if the future language would indeed have to be written or otherwise.

I'm assuming you are the same guyI didn't see anything in your physioalphabet about designing the characters to minimize hand motion.
To me, a good character is one that is not only easy and quick to write, but one that also transitions well into the following character that makes up the word.

i.e. a capital L is better than a capital T, because an L can be written without lifting the pencil from the page, and if you draw it starting from the top to the bottom, you will end up to the right of the character, where you can then draw your next character in the word.

So you want the most simplistic possible language and writing system? That isn't optimal, logical, systematic or anything. You mislead me.

Binary? Why hasn't anybody considered binary yet? Also, we have switched to the metric system. America just needs to leave the planet.

>So you want the most simplistic possible language and writing system?

Where did you get that from? When did I ever say that?

>No one in areas of America that matter will get salty at you for saying "I go shopping now" instead of "I'll go shopping now." Pull that shit with the French and they'll take your fucking head off.
I think that is largely due to the fact that native English speakers are used to their language being raped by slavs, frogs and various niggers; sand or otherwise. Whilst Finns for instance are not used to hearing their language from non-native speakers and thus expect it to be perfect. Native English speakers just have lower standards than others.

The characters themselves should be distinct from each other, lower case L and upper case I look the same in many sans serif fonts, just like zero and uppercase O, as they do in my handwriting. This is a problem. If I need to specify a lower case L out of context in handwriting I will use a loopy cursive typeface. Lower case letters were invented to make writing smaller glyphs possible. Stationary used to be expensive. From a design standpoint the set of glyphs should have a consistent look. They should be equally complex. Not one character drawn with two lines and one drawn with seven curves two lines and a dot, in the same set. Another thing to consider is the ergonomics of writing. The glyphs should be easy to write, and even after the approximation of the ideal glyph by drawing it out by hand, it should be easy to recognize. Even if written sloppily the glyphs should look distinct and recognizable.

>"Written English and spoken English aren't that different if at all"

English orthography is so fucked that "spelling bees" exist for it. This is supposed to be the most optimal language?

>English orthography is so fucked that "spelling bees" exist for it.

That's actually pretty funny when you think about it. I never looked at it that way.

An easy way to rule out badly designed words, like the pair though/thought or their/there one could first specify a set of syllables, similar to hiragana, of syllables that are easy to pronounce and easy to distinguish. Then any word is legal only if constructed of those syllables. And only if it differs from all existing words by more than say 1/4 or 1/3 of its syllables. This way no two words would ever be too alike.

Hey OP. Recently I've been asking the same questions. My interest in making my own efficient language resurfaces every few years. It's a childhood dream of mine. I recently just went through the phase again so I'm going to tell you what I thought about since you might be interested.

1. Reduce size of vocabulary to the least number of words possible. Remove redundant words, excessively long words, phrases, onomatopoeias, abbreviations, hyphenations, ambiguous verbs, as many adjectives and adverbs as possible. Prioritize nouns and prepositions, get rid of ambiguous quantifiers like "few", "many", only allow actual quantities and strict intervals.

2. Definitions. Dependency of definitions should be emphasized within dictionaries. Words should be sorted in dictionary by function rather than alphabetically.

3. Phonetics. Too many sounds. Words should be constructed with simpler consonant vowel pairs. Words should be made by multiplication tables of conosants and vowels so combinations are easy to build and make words out of. I discovered that the type of language I was looking for already has been made and exists and they are called Agglutinative languages. Examples include Sumerian, Japanese, and Turkish, among others.

4. Alphabet. Alphabets are where I stopped, as I realized that what I was trying to do was just make language more like math and logic, and that since I already have math and logic, I could just use math and logic and their structures more often in my daily thinking. That aside, I did start designing my own alphabet and numeral system anyway, just because it is fun to do.

(continued in next post)

(continued)

I also looked for alphabets and writing systems with properties I liked.

Sumerian: Very few mark types to form letters, which means sentences can be formed quickly with a few types of stamp configurations.

Hangul (Korean): Also not too many mark types, and not too many transformations on mark types. Unlike traditional Chinese, where skewing and shrinking of certain basic marks can become obscured, Hangul is simpler and more regular in the mark transformations. I found a nice phonetic combination sheet that combined marks and their vowels and it was exactly like a multiplication table which scored a lot of points with me.

Mongolian/Ancient Basque Miller Numerals/Sanskrit: I really like the idea of extending everything from a literal, "line of thought." Mongolian and Ancient Basque Numerals use vertical lines while Sanskrit of course uses horizontal. Just because vertical lines are easier for me to draw I found myself leaning more toward Mongolian and Ancient Basque Numerals.

I have the hardest time writing curves and diagonals slow me and aesthetically I just don't like them. Sometimes soft serifs are okay, like in [math]\pi[/math] and [math]\tau[/math], but otherwise I prefer horizontal and vertical lines for everything else.

But yeah, in the end what I decided was that I was just going to deliberately seek out a vocabulary and sentence types within English that suited my needs rather than make my own language.

The more grammaticaly complex the language (not phoneticaly), the better for the intellectual development of the speakers IMO.

Almost forgot: Braille also scored points for being tactile, which means you can probably take in information faster than by listening one sound at a time, and, I also came across a curious book which is related to language construction and constraint. The book is a leipogram called Gadsby, and the letter "e" does not occur anywhere in it's 50k words. Not a long book, but related to the idea of limiting vocabulary, dictionary, vowels, production rules, language.

>We also need to switch to the metric system.
Science already uses the metric system.

Every society uses it's own classical measurements system and the metric system for official international business.

China: jin for weight, li for distance, but also fluent in metric for other things.

USA/England: Pound for weight, mile for distance, gallon for volume, but also kilometer and kilogram, and liter side by side

Base 12 has more divisors to than base 10, that's why we use the foot, inch and pound for common items

>How could you design a writing system that is the most optimal?

Ask this man. But fuck off with your gay idea for a gay one world government/culture.

>I prefer horizontal and vertical lines for everything else.
Hebrew has three writing systems. The first is what you see in books and the internet. The second is purely made up of straight lines, though some are diagonal. This is good for people who have messy handwriting, and for people who are beginning to learn the language.
The third is cursive, which is used for writing quickly.
I'm not saying we should use the Hebrew characters, but maybe use something like this for the "perfect" language.

My biggest complaint about English is that often I run into situations where the words I'm looking for don't exist in English and instead I have to restructure my thoughts in order to rephrase what should be a word as a sentence.

I prefer American (Webster's) English over British (Oxford) English (with a few exceptions) because American is more consistently Latin+German based (Oxford is sometimes Latin+German, sometimes French+German, and other times neither). One thing I don't like with American English is that quotation marks swallow up periods and commas.
American:
>So I said "kill yourself, retard."
English:
>So I said "kill yourself, retard".

I think constructed languages have adoption as their biggest opposing force. Our best bet is instead to:
>take English (or some other hugely popular language) as a starting language.
>pick out a subset of it that can be formally described, call this subset 'Core English' (CE) or something.
>Then expand CE in a natural way by following its rules (i.e. effectively filling in CE with CE versions of regular English words).

This way regular English speakers can understand CE speakers and are able to switch to CE over time by slowly picking up the rules. More importantly having a nicer set of rules allows users to have a better intuition over the language and thus create new words/conjugations with ease.

The goal of language is to ease communication and give people the means to capture abstractions. I shouldn't have to say "My mouth and body are in a state of distress after having eaten something too spicy" when other languages have an adjective for that, "I'm ______".

While this phonetic alphabet is neat and interesting I don't think it would be very useful for a specific language. The problem isn't just in writing but also in reading.

Consider Nahuatl, the language spoken throughout much of prehispanic Mexico including the Triple Empire (essentially the lingua franca of Mexico back in its heyday). From Wikipedia:
>Nahuan languages exhibit a complex morphology characterized by polysynthesis and agglutination.

Typically this language is transcribed using what is essentially the English alphabet. However, as I hope you'll see, this alphabet is too verbose for the language and instead clutters it by often making words long and tedious to read or write. Recently a guy proposed an Abugida (a writing system one may use as an alternative to a full blown alphabet). This abugida was designed with logographic writing systems like Chinese in mind and as a result it is easier to read, easier to write, and turns walls of text into nice readable paragraphs.
unifont.org/nahuatl/#example_one

Now think, if the English alphabet butchered this language like this then just imagine what a phonetic alphabet would do.

To be clear, I'm not saying Abugidas are the way to go, just that phonetic alphabets are not general purpose.

Finnish. You speak exactly like it is written, hence the monotonic accent. There are no prepositions but postpostions so extra words like: 'the on in at' are unneeded. We also have used the metric system for over 200 years.

A few radical ideas I propose:
>Higher order plurals (i.e. plural of plural) and in general a sane way for pluralizing words.
For real, that shit is broken.
>Nested parenthesis, as in math.
What could go wrong (try it (it's fun (I promise)))?
>Indentation (or something) for handling scope similar to programming languages.
The language should make it easy for people to juggle the sorts of complicated arguments and abstractions of the future. All too common people lose track of their conversations and jump from topic to topic because they aren't used to thinking in a way that allows them to maintain scope. Think of how often you've seen people retrace a conversation to figure out how they got there in the first place (perhaps because something important was forgotten along the way).
>Inverted question marks and exclamation marks like Spanish uses.
This should make the language easier for humans and machines to parse.
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/¿_?#Translingual

I'm interested to hear your wild and crazy proposals.

>Though/tough/etc. Those are inefficiencies.
These are not problems. They are part of the reason english is good.

Language is important in how we categorize our thoughts to even interpret the world around us. This is why def people used to be pretty stupid until we started teaching them sign language and suddenly they were normal people who just couldn't hear. Language is critical to how you think.

English is not the most straightforward language, but that is its strength, you think in unstraightforward ways.

This is why anglos keep conquering the earth. This is why the greeks were pretty hot shit as, their language has a lot of potential poetic flexibility to it that requires active interpretation.

Im not sure if a better, synthetic, language could be made, but i do know that making a language thats straightforward, logical, and with out the need to interpret or consider context, will just make our minds lazy.

>The third is cursive, which is used for writing quickly

Cursive has actually been shown to use less concentration than typing once it has been learned, interestingly enough. Writing in print- in unconnected, straight, un-serifed letters apparently requires the most amount of concentration within writing methods.

>one thing I don't like with AE is that quotation marks swallow up periods and commas

Agreed.

Finnish is a Uralic language like Hungarian, which is an Agglutinative language so that would make sense that it is spoken exactly as it is written. I'm not familiar with postpositions- how do you form sentences without using "in" or "the"?

>nested parenthesis
>indentation for handling scope

If only. Indentation is a great communication tool as it immediately tells you what order to read in. I always forget this, but it didn't originate in programming either, lawyers and scholars have been doing it since forever because of how useful it is for organizing clauses in doctrine and contracts. And, although I don't prefer speech as a means of communication and prefer written/read communication, indentation just doesn't have a natural analog in speech as it does in writing, which again is the problem inherit in speech, not indentation, since you can't "see" structure in speech as obviously as something you are reading.

Good ideas though. Glad to see this thread pop up.

English has an immense vocabulary. If you can't find a word it's most likely your own fault.

>requires the most amount of concentration within writing methods.
So the block writing system is for beginners, and once the language is learned, people start using the cursive system. A bit like English.

>English
>a language that has he/she/it/xe/they to refer to the same thing
>has baked in genderism to cause social problems

I mean from a particular pov it is a good idea to pick a simple stupid language as the lowest common denominator, but it is not a coincidence we use compilers to write machine code.

Whenever I think about how poor people are who speak English only I cry a little inside.

>how do you form sentences without using "in" or "the"?
Not the same guy, but I'll give you an example.

>the owner of a dog takes the dog out for a walk in a park
>koiran omistaja vie koiran kävelylle puistossa
Here you can probably already identify the words "dog" and "koiran", and this shows a slight inefficiency in the language. The first time you have "koiran" it means "of a dog" (koira = a dog), on the other hand, the next time it's not the genetive, but it refers to the dog being something that is taken somewhere (viedä = to take out, "i took the dog out for a walk", which in this case is in the form "vie", "takes out"). "Omistaja" is by no means interesting, it means literally just "a/the owner". "Kävelylle" is just "for a walk", here the word "for" adds "lle" in the end, kävely = a walk. "Puistossa" is "in a park", here "in" adds "ssa" (or in some cases "ssä") to the word, puisto = a park.

Analyzing this, you see how there are letters added to the end to change the meaning, that is, auxiliary words, such as prepositions or "a", "an" and "the", are dropped off. One can have pseudoarticles by saying "I took this one dog for a walk in that park", but those are just to make things a bit more precise.

Hungarian is related, but probably not as good. The reason is the letter S. Our S is their SZ, where as their S is (iirc) pretty much Š. That SZ thing I remember for sure because "perse" is "ass" in Finnish, "persze" is "of course" in Hungarian, and they sound the same.

C#

I know this is a science board, but you should look into history if you think anglos "keep" conquering the earth

>if you think anglos "keep" conquering the earth
They ended up conquering it though.

You would think that but you would be wrong. As someone who doesn't have a European culture/cuisine/etc.. I often encounter terminology that exists in other languages but does not exist in English. This is fine for many people as such terminology would be uncommon and have limited use in their culture.

The example I gave is a simple one, the Spanish word is:
>Enchilado
No English equivalent exists.
es.oxforddictionaries.com/translate/spanish-english/enchilado
>terminamos bien enchilados, hasta nos lloraban los ojos
>by the time we finished even our eyes were watering, it was so hot
You can plainly see the translation is imprecise. The English version only refers to the "state of being in distress from having consumed something spicy" indirectly, in a roundabout way. A proper direct translation would look like
>We ended up very ________, even our eyes were crying/watering.

There are many countries throughout the world where dialects of English are spoken that really amount to English + vocab/grammatical rules from local language. This is one of the causes.

This is an interesting article. It mentions some interesting language features I hadn't even considered.
medium.economist.com/we-went-in-search-of-the-worlds-hardest-language-95a27c2cff3

Here is an excerpt.
>Tuyuca, of the eastern Amazon. It has a sound system with simple consonants and a few nasal vowels, so is not as hard to speak as Ubykh or !Xóõ. Like Turkish, it is heavily agglutinating, so that one word, hóabãsiriga means “I do not know how to write.” Like Kwaio, it has two words for “we”, inclusive and exclusive. The noun classes (genders) in Tuyuca’s language family (including close relatives) have been estimated at between 50 and 140. Some are rare, such as “bark that does not cling closely to a tree”, which can be extended to things such as baggy trousers, or wet plywood that has begun to peel apart.

>Most fascinating is a feature that would make any journalist tremble. Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”. English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb. Evidential languages force speakers to think hard about how they learned what they say they know.

I wonder how different chinese cartoons are for people who don't speak nip

Writing system?
Never seen any "real" one more aesthetic than tengwar. Quite easy/practical aswell.

wew lad
jbr.me.uk/ranto/

>English is not the most straightforward language, but that is its strength, you think in unstraightforward ways.

You cannot seriously think that English qualifies as unstraightforward in a world with thousands of languages.

Speaking of unstraightforward, one language feature I'm quite fond of is called difrasismo. The way it works is that when certain key words appear together they form a new sort of 'word unit' with an entirely different meaning from the original words (but it can be derived from the original words in an extreme metaphorical sense). Essentially it works like metaphor on steroids and can totally mindfuck the unacquainted into thinking they're having a stroke. This feature appears commonly in mesoamerican languages such as Nahuatl and Maya.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difrasismo

There's actually a surprising amount of effort that goes into localization (either professional or fan based) with a number of contentious issues (like how to handle honorifics). The saddest casualty in my book is that some things are simply untranslatable (like pun based shows).

A metric alphabet. This however causes strictness and reduces creativity.

Finnish
>Spoken exactly like it is written, zero difficulties in pronounciation
>Good logical suffixes, no need for retarded articles
>Vowel harmony
>Very synthetic language
>No genders
>Best curse words
>Visually aesthetic and sounds nice

How can indo-europeans even compete?

>not a synthetic language
>best
lel

Lojban is pretty efficent. Phonetic spelling, culturally neutral, no ambiguous anything.

The problem with inventing new languages wholesale is that you now have to get everyone in the world to learn it, which is terribly impractical. Even Esperanto which uses a lot of Romance vocabulary and was invented over 100 years ago isn't widely spoken even in Europe.

English is already the global language. The only real problem it has is a terribly convoluted orthography. I think a more realistic scenario is to reform English spelling. It doesn't even have to be a radical script change like some people propose; just using diacritics to disambiguate vowels would make learning to read immensely easier.

There is no best or "optimal" language.

To be more nuanced, there are un-optimal languages, but they can't exist. All existing languages are computational procedures optimal for meeting interface conditions.

>get rid of ambiguous quantifiers like "few", "many", only allow actual quantities and strict intervals.

I don't know so much about that. I think having abstract and contextual words are necessary for the functioning of a language.

>Words should be sorted in dictionary by function rather than alphabetically.

I think that would be impossible to do. How do you prioritize a function? You can prioritize the alphabet by starting with the first letter, but I don't see how you could possibly prioritize the function of a word. Unless by function you mean function in a sentence i.e. adjective, adverb, verb, noun, etc.

>Sumerian: Very few mark types to form letters, which means sentences can be formed quickly with a few types of stamp configurations.

Are you joking? See pic related.

Please elaborate.

>gay idea for a gay one world government/culture.

When did I ever say this?

>quotation marks swallow up periods and commas.


I hate that too, it makes no sense.

>Indentation (or something) for handling scope similar to programming languages.

Don't people already indent? What do you mean by this?

>Nested parenthesis, as in math.

Again, don't people already do this? Maybe it wouldn't be accepted in a school paper, but if people wanted too(or NEEDED to), people are already free to use nested parenthesis.

>def people used to be pretty stupid

lol

>until we started teaching them sign language and suddenly they were normal people who just couldn't hear.

Interesting, but citation needed.

fuckoff back to tumblr and reddit please

your burger is showing

I speak 3 languages and they all have gendered pronouns.

Japanese

>has baked in genderism to cause social problems
Huh? Genders in English are practically nonexistent. I don't quite get what you're trying to say. As just one example, in Russian EVERY part of speech, except adverb, has gender.

bup

Contrived example:

There was a dude who got a hand transplant.
>He had Sepsis and had to have a hand, a foot, and
>fingers/toes removed.
>>Sepsis may happen for many reasons ......
>The odds of him surviving were really low.
>>Doctors told him he was probably going to die and to
>>call everyone he loved. They told his wife that he had
>>at best a 10% chance of survival. His doctor later said
>>that in all her years as a doctor that dude was the
>>sickest person to ever walk out alive.
>They induced a coma that lasted over two weeks and he
>had all sorts of crazy hallucinations that changed his
>outlook on life.
>>His first hallucination went on for "days".
>>>In it he was tied to a bench and demons would bring
>>>buckets of snakes that would bite him every day. They
>>>would always talk about him as if he wasn't there.
>>His next set of hallucinations....
>>>.....
...
>>In his final hallucination he was faced with a choice
>>between life and death.
>>>There were two doors and a voice asking him to
>>>choose. As he walked in this space his memories of
>>>everyone in his life washed over him. He initially
>>>chose death but then a memory of his daughter made
>>>him choose life.
>>>>The memory was from when his daughter was very
>>>>little. He had used a stethoscope so his daughter
>>>>could hear his heart. Then he told her he had a
>>>>heart of a champion who never quit. Then he had
>>>>her listen to her own heart to which she exclaimed
>>>>that it sounded like his and therefore she had the
>>>>heart of a champion too. His daughter would then
>>>>grow up to always believe in never giving up.
>>>As soon as he walked through the door he was
>>>jettisoned upwards through what seemed like murky
>>>water.
>When he awoke immediately after the last hallucination
>his resolve was stronger than ever and it's likely the
>reason he was able to become a candidate for the
>transplant.
>>It takes a lot of work on the part of the candidate...

The idea here is that if you need to temporarily jump to another topic for some reason (perhaps giving some background info or elaborating on something) then you may do so by indenting. The fact that you've indented serves as a reminder that this isn't the main topic you're interested in discussing and keeps you from losing track of the conversation. Moreover, it also allows a reader to choose whether or not to follow into an indentation (effectively performing something equivalent to 'code folding'). Note that as a side effect one may choose to read only the 'top level' sentences and thereby acquire a brief summary, and since the summary is woven into the structure of the main text then it also functions as a sort of table of contents!

In the future we will continue to be more and more inundated with information and being able to navigate, keep track, search through, etc... will become more and more necessary to future readers. Future writers will also need to find ways to deal with more and more complicated topics that require many large tangential explanations. A future language should provide for them the means to communicate such concepts clearly, otherwise people simply won't read them.

On the spoken language side of things, I hope that this approach to reading and writing should change the way people conceptualize things and allow them to communicate better as a whole (being able to keep track of conversations and breaking down complicated concepts into basic components).

On a personal note, I know a guy who I cannot have a mathematical conversation with without him going off on sequence of long tangents about some technical details I am not interested in. The dude rarely makes a complete point and the topic jumps so many times that I honestly can't justify the time investment. A future language should not allow for this.

try Finnish/Hungarian

Of course you do, that's why we can't have stewardess anymore just flight attendants.

>in Russian EVERY part of speech, except adverb, has gender.
sounds horrible, I can't imagine it serves any purpose

bup

write something yorubic, user

To me, the "best" language would be the most precise and concise.

Verbosity tends to obscure meaning.

How would you go about designing such a language? not sure.
all connectives should be short. things like "therefore" should be condensed. It should also be possible to vocalize the language.

consistency in human language? hahahaa

>try Finnish/Hungarian
They haven't contributed to physics, sooo no?

japanese is the only language on earth

yameteeee
hentaiiiiii
soko dame~~~~~~~~

Shibbal sekki.

Jk.

>No one in areas of America that matter will get salty at you for saying "I go shopping now" instead of "I'll go shopping now."
Ching chong bing bong

>What could go (((wrong)))

>in the sense of taking pencil and paper and physically writing out paragraph. How could you design characters that would make that process the fastest?
And why would you need that? Almost everything is written on computer anyway.

No! You're using it for EVIL!

This. Removing syntactical ambiguity as a matter of course is huge. I'd definitely learn it front to back if it wasn't an essentially useless exercise in mental masturbation.

This too. English is definitely more and more an "industry standard" because so much jargon and technical terminology relevant to several key fields is originally English, owing to the computer and Internet being developed in the English-speaking world. Most physical science PhD programs in the US/UK now no longer require competence with other languages, and most journal publications are now written in English. "Journal article English," however, has a highly standardized form and its own internal logic, to where you almost don't need to understand conversational English or prose in order to use or understand it, and many non-scientist native English speakers struggle with it in turn. There are also pidgins of course, which strip some fundamentals out of the context of prescribed rules in the interest of basic communication and ease of use. I guess they're, like, opposing paradigms, in a sense.
>Core English
I like this idea. It's not too far off from what I've mentioned. We might have to do something about the fricative "th" though, since most of the world can't say it and now even britbongs are forgetting how.

>sounds horrible, I can't imagine it serves any purpose
Does something has to have a purpose in a natural language? Though I guess a complex declension system allows you to omit like half of the sentence.

>Higher order plurals (i.e. plural of plural) and in general a sane way for pluralizing words.
Reminds me of that bushman language where they repeat words to make them plural, i.e. (tree tree) = trees, (tree tree tree) = forest
Not sure which it was.

We ended up very affected by spiciness, even our eyes were watering.

>are you joking?

Almost every letter is just some configuration of this mark type in pic attached. V, U, and O use the top portion of the mark but extend the edges. If you got rid of that mark, every letter could be formed with one stamp.

>Unless by function you mean function in a sentence

Yes. That dictionaries are ordered by function rather than by the rather random ordering of the alphabet would greatly improve people's understanding of language. Too often do I see people neglect unambiguous use of language because English teachers themselves encourage ambiguity. This is a problem because the people who need English teachers usually are not intelligent enough to appreciate ambiguity so it doesn't at all help them when they're encouraged to learn the general form before specific instances of it.

>I don't know so much about that. I think having abstract and contextual words are necessary for the functioning of a language

I don't agree with that. I think it just leaves more room for petty disagreement and for con-artists to work their magic on dumb people who have been taught to be mystified by vague language.

What if you got a few eggs in a basket and you want to say "I have a few eggs here" without counting all of them? You are forcing everyone to count every quantity they're talking about, which will take a lot of time.

Chinese

bip

Unary is objectively the best form of communication as it leaves no room for ambiguity.

slang, as language is an ever evolving process

>irregular asymmetric strokes
>arrangements are mondrianized pictograms and have little to no relation to what they "actually" look like

Gonna pass bro.

There is nothing wrong with your translation. I was only pointing out that without the missing word one is forced to indirectly refer to it and this affects the way one conceptualizes it as a concept.

For instance, suppose you didn't have the word burned. You would no longer be able to say:
>We ended up very burned, even our hair was gone.
Instead you would have to speak in a roundabout way saying:
>We ended up very affected by fire, even our hair was gone.
Moreover it becomes unnatural and clumsy to speak about things that have been burned because the very abstraction doesn't really exist.

Consider that one may not notice it in a society where being burned is extremely rare. Suppose now that you come from a society where burning is commonplace and part of your every day tradition. Next suppose that you've moved to a society where the verb 'to burn' doesn't even exist in their local language. How weird is it for you to use this language in your every day life? How difficult is it for others there to relate to you? If this language became widespread in your own land, would people have to bring in loan words in order to communicate fluidly in this language? Would they even really be speaking the language or just a mangled mix of theirs and yours (like Manglish, Spanglish, etc...)?

Even if you don't agree. Do you at least understand what I mean when I say that one is at times forced to speak about things in indirect ways because the words/abstractions do not exist in their language?

In my every day life I often find that English vocabulary is insufficient for seamlessly communicating the things I wish to communicate.

>always forget this, but it didn't originate in programming either, lawyers and scholars have been doing it since forever because of how useful it is for organizing clauses in doctrine and contracts.
Do you have a resource on this? I have been on the lookout for any and all material talking about how to design the typesetting for formal documents and text editors (e.g. for programming). I would be super grateful for anything you could provide!

pic related, I'm fucking thrilled

english
>many people speak it already
>it's fairly easy to learn, even for chinks
>simple writing system

what, you don't like compounded nouns?