From the journal of Simeon the Renegade

29/06/13 Languageneering

I thought this planet would be perfect. I am alone! Why wouldn’t it be! I have secured the basic utilities that are instrumental to my survival. I have devised my own units for time, in accordance to this planet’s unique cycle of day and night. Length, mass, and temperature were similar in their importance. I have chosen the units of length to amount precisely to one million when circling the Equator; the mass, of course, is of one million for the entire planet; and temperature goes from absolute zero to one million, one million being the warmest possible temperature in the summer.

I have built my little farm; there I grow potatoes - for they are quite the resilient crop. One day, I wish they will mutate in some distinct way, and shed the peel of their foreigness to this land. I have selected their particular family, Solanum Tuberosum Incrementum, the quickest-growing species, so as to facilitate evolution, in the manner of insects, with multiple generations each day (which is about four ‘Earth’ days). Maybe potatoes here are going to be blue? Maybe they will have an elastic consistency or better nutritional properties? Irregardless of which mutation does occur, I will foster every last one of them to the largest possible extant until I finally find one for which I can truthfully declare: “This does not come from any other world!” My personal hope is that it will be a potato that may grow absolutely anywhere on this planet; yet my past dictates that I should never hope for a positive outcome of any kind. It will be good enough that they are different, the same way that I am different; for, after all, I, too, am made of DNA. I brought with me the corruption of all beings molded in that format of existence.

To be an unwanted child!

An unwanted child of Man!

To have my every effort deliberately pushed into the dust! And the nagging, eternal chuckle of demons!

They did not want me, and so it is clear that I do not want them.

They did not like me, and so it is clear that I do not like them.

They do not care, and they never will. I am choosing freedom, and so it is clear that I do not choose Man.

Alas! I am an individual of my species; I possess the capacity to communicate through words, and more than that, I feel an urge to engage in such an activity. Barren as this world is of my kind, I find myself irremediably, against my better, stronger, will, using my own self as a partner in dialogue both by speech and by writing. I tried! I tried simply ‘Ogging’ and ‘Babaging’, generating incoherent strings of syllables; bado sa tero mi falo grêtoa! Vagaga! Mosobozoto! These sounds are not remotely evoking to the rational center of my brain. To the contrary, I revert to languages I have learned in my youth, for those are imprinted quite deeply.

And so it is; that I find myself in need of creating a new language, one that is not polluted by false brothers: they cannot receive any credit in anything happening on this planet. Their only credit is their sperm and egg - an achievement equal in height to that of some primitive, bestial animal!

Some might claim that ‘he was not truly alone; he used tools made by others’. What about MY tools? Do you not use them in full impunity, beyond repercussion? I have destroyed the space vessel, the computers, the clothes, and all artifacts that enabled this Journey; for such is the extent of THEIR contempt. And so it is clear that my contempt for them is perfectly equalizing.

This entry will now focus on its primary point: for developing language is incredibly challenging, and there might very well be rational means to simplify such a process.

...

Is there a single root? Such a notion is clearly erroneous, if only by observing the prevalence of dualized words that seems required to tell meanings apart. Roosters and Hens are male and female birds; meanwhile Poultry is their food gender. We understand implicitly that Firefighters and Pyrotechnicians perform differentiated tasks, because they do not use the same ‘Fire’ word (‘pyro’ is greek for ‘fire’).

The simplest proof is the absence of a path going through the generic concepts: speed can be known as the derivative of length in time, and so it seems that the root of concepts such as speed are the fundamental units of measurement; those are multiple to begin with, but let’s put that aside for the time being, and suppose that all fundamental units are somehow measuring the same type of quantity; on the opposite side of things, a Wolf is a Mammal; its single most rational root is Biota, the root of the Tree of Life.

‘Biota’ appears very much unrelated to ‘Fundamental units of measurement’.

And so it seems that there are a multitude of natural trees; and even more complicated, Wolfs are both Wolfs and Canis Lupus. Let’s accept as a premise that there needs to be multiple words for the same things in order to express complex notions without too much confusion, and further expect that these different words should be different in the same sort of way in their particular class of meaning (ex: systematic latin naming for the formal catalogue of biological species).

Therefore, ‘Ba’ is not the root for every word, and if we indulge that ‘Ba’ should mean ‘Time’, then it is wrong to assume that ‘Elephant’ can be expressed as a rational repetition of ‘Ba’, such as ‘Babababababa’, in the context that it forces the implication that Elephant is the fifth descendant of Time.

Which brings us to the next problem: just how long should a word be? It seems fair, on its face, that roots should be shorter, and their descendants should be longer forms. If they are constructed rather than invented, they could be generated through accumulation of prefixes, infixes and suffixes. This is not very original, still, the more specialized a word, the longer, and least generic, it ‘feels’ it should be. Yet it is that there is no clear demarcation as far as the total number of roots in existence - probably above 26, or even 676, therefore at least three letters are minimally required for some of them.

It becomes apparent that frequency of use is important - afterall, often-used words generally evolve a ‘short form’ - and those types of words that should be the shortest are going to be mostly performing syntactic functions. Not roots, but rather structural information.

Additionally, words as simple as ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’ and ‘d’ appear rather well suited for labeling generic variables, since their purpose is to be temporarily repeated often.

And so, the short answer seems to be “a very short word is not a real ‘name’ word, but otherwise roots are shortest, and the furthest descendant is longest, unless its frequency of usage is high.”

What of multiple meanings for individual words? It only makes sense because there is a limit on the quantity of short words a language is able to possess. I would expect that the best form of multiple meaning is when the words are not quite the same, but used in vastly different contexts; and so ‘speed’ is a measurement unit, and ‘spade’ is a family of cards. It would be hard to confuse the two, even though they sound alike, provided they existed within a context. Going against this point, a spade possesses a second definition as a digging tool; for identical words to share multiple meanings seems undesirable (the digging tool came before the card - whatever).

If two possible interpretations belong to two distinct trees, then simply appending the root at the end of the word serves well as a specifier, such as in “spade tool” and “speed unit”. And so the most important feature of multiple meanings is that they should not be part of the same tree. Two meanings could share the same word if they exist in different trees yet possess nearly identical functions: in such an instance it must be that we are less concerned with roles or genders of the meaning encompassed in that word.

...

‘Journalist’, ‘Journalism’, ‘Journal’, ‘Journalian’, ‘Journaler’, ‘Journalor’, ‘Journaling’, ‘Journalest’, ‘Journalic’; one word, nine twists. Those are different from mere suffixes denoting branching further down a tree. Rather, they are the ‘Journal’ embodied into an individual, a conceptual institution or behavior, etc. If an ‘Amplifier’ is some sort of physical object that performs the action of amplifying, then a ‘Journaler’ must be similar. An exception is the plural form, arrays being a form of temporary parent node.

Is not a ‘Journal’ a corporation that employs multiple ‘Journalists’, thus creating a clear parent node? I would argue to the contrary that ‘Journal’ is a concept, and individual copies of individual issues, written by teams of individual writers, payrolled by some publishing corporation, are all the terms pertaining to the particular tree created by that particular operation, at that particular corporation. In the tree designed by such an entity, the top node is possibly the CEO; and so we would be falling to some confusion as to the multiple meanings of words, this particular tree having been created largely as a partial, biased duplicate. That is not to say that some derivative tree could not be salient, in abstract terms, and keep those relationships that are not simply particular individuals, as such, in that new tree, copies are children of issues, which are children of Journal, while Journalist is a child of Journalists, while Journalists is a child of Journal. At that point, however, it might be worthwhile to reconsider those naming conventions. Maybe everyone involved in the journal is a journalist, and writers are part of the production sub-tree.

There are many unsolved problems in this short entry, but I feel tired from farming potatoes all day. I need my sleep.

Belzen kot fawoar meliz an bo! Dosh vero cessugeth alamiu memindshku.