World-Text

Tinkerers Anonymous: Some people can't help making changes to "fix" Toki Pona. This is a playground for their ideas.
Tokiponidistoj: Iuj homoj nepre volas fari ŝanĝojn por "ripari" Tokiponon. Jen ludejo por iliaj ideoj.
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janMato
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World-Text

Post by janMato »

So with proposed Islamificiation of toki pona, I started to think some more about Buddhist conlangs and recently I read about Shingon Buddhism, ref google books

Fascinating stuff-- the world is made of symbols, a world-text and to understand the world you have to be able to see symbols & inbetween the symbols. This is about the opposite of Zen, where the symbols, language, fingers, all just get in the way of understanding things as they really are.

So in a Shingon context, creating a new language could be an effort to uncover the world-text and see the world as it really is. Not especially a new concept-- lots of historical conlangs promise a better match between the symbols and reality, but first time I've read about a con-langy idea in Buddhism.

No evidence that Shingon Buddhists ever actually tried to uncover the world-text, in the sense of writing a language that wasn't Sanskrit, Chinese, or Japanese.

Anyhow, thought I'd pass that along.
janSilipu
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Re: World-Text

Post by janSilipu »

Well, I doubt that tp is about to be Islamified any more than it started out Daoized or could be Buddhaated. Orwell notwithstanding, languages don't lend themselves to ideological manipulation much.
Perversely, I think that Shingon and Zen are basically the same (Nagarjuna, the logician, is a Master in both traditions). After all, if everything is a symbol, there is nothing left to be symbolized and thus all the symbols are empty and we are back to Nirvana =Samsara = Void almost as fast as one hand can clap.
But an Abhidharma language (not just Skt with a funny alphabet) might be interesting (no nouns, only adjectives or verbs). Whorf at least thought this this notion was meaningful and possible (even real, e.g., Hopi).
janMato
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Re: World-Text

Post by janMato »

buddhaHat.jpg
buddhaHat.jpg (10.23 KiB) Viewed 7756 times
Buddha-hatted?

Re: languages with out the nouns
Algonquin is a lot like that. Most of the things that in English are nouns are instead verbs that indicate what that thing does. Maybe a Buddhist-like language would have a lot of derivational morphology indicating what caused something. (Bread = thing that the oven bakes)
janKipo
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Re: World-Text

Post by janKipo »

Hey, Sid! Cute hat! Is there a crochet pattern for it?
Aside from the "thing that" part, that sound a lot like what a Buddhist language should be like.
janMato
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Re: World-Text

Post by janMato »

I'm still dinking around with the idea of creating a set theory inspired language. So far, not much progress.

Now I don't know much about set theory, but I remember the definitions of natural numbers -- copying from wikipedia: 0 = {}, 1 = {0} = {{}}, 2 = {0,1} = {{},{{}}}, 3 = {0,1,2} = {{},{{}},{{},{{}}}}

That just has a very mahayana Buddhist feel to it, everything is made up of empty sets.

I still haven't nailed down what practical set theory inspired grammar might be, my first few attempts were massively verbose and influenced by programming languages. The first challenge I ran into is that in simple sentences, it is uncommon to have long strings of anything. "So there was this set, a grammarian, a logician and a mathematician. They entered a bar."-- Most things we feel like talking about are relationships between a small number of things, lists are the unusual case. It seems pedantic to expect people to name the sets they want to talk about when 95% of them will be sets of a single item. Another technicial challenge of a set theory inspired language-- the need to name sets. If I do it the programmer's way-- then we are using essentially proper nouns, "So there was this set, a grammarian, a logician and a mathematician. Call them, the X team. The X team entered a bar."

Another technical challenge I ran into with a set theory inspired language was that the idea of a bunch of sets or lists of elements encourages an analytic grammar instead of using morphology to build up a big verb that does most of the work. If a language is all about the abstract relationships and the things are de-emphasized, then you'd expect a bunch of verbs-- verbs in human languages do more work by creating a big template with lots of slots for nailing down relationships among participants. I just don't see how to map set thoery ideas to templates-- we use templates in programming all the time, just never in anything that looks like recognizable human communication. "So imagine the numbered participants, 1- a mathematician, 2 - a logician, 3- a grammarian, 4 - a bar, 5 - the utterance "Ouch". As it turns out, 1, 2, and 3 walked into 4 and said 5. And if you like that joke, I got a million, more, just apply that template to 1- a rabbi, 2- a nun, 3 - a salimander, etc"

And the set elements have to be spoken in order, so these aren't really sets, but would be ordered lists-- listeners couldn't help but notice that the speaker said something first, something in the middle, and something last, probably based on some sort of ranking of importance or relevance.

Anyhow, that's just the start of my woes. Should it be declarative or imperative? (i.e. 3 guys walked into a bar. Ouch. vs. imagine a stage, 3 men, move the 3 men until they collide with a bar. make them all say ouch!) Should it actually involve real math or should it just have a human grammar in the cloths of math, sort of a mystico-magical-cargo-cult language, e.g. "What do you want for breakfast?" vs "Declare a variable of type food called X. Solve for x, where x is what you want for breakfast"

Ironically, when I started this idea I thought sets might be a simpler structure than grammar trees, or beads-on-a-string/tree-less/recursion-free grammars of proto-langauges (and maybe toki pona)-- instead, if a set theoretic language really was set theoretic, it looks like it would be quite hard, and if not hard, massively verbose.

Anyhow, this all gives me the idea of re-visiting my lexicon and seeing if the words can be derived from each other, and the root word derived from nothing, something like:

nada = nothing
yada = silence
pan = famine, breadlessness
yada-nada = chit chat, conversatoin
wowa-yada-nada = serious conversation
pan-nanda = crumbs
wowa-pan-nada = a feast
janKipo
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Re: World-Text

Post by janKipo »

I'm not quite sure what a set-theory-inspired language would be like, distinct from a logic-inspired one. An ontology of only atoms and sets, with only identity, membership and inclusion as predicates? Not very practical and ultimately not all that different from, say, Lojban, since all the useful stuff comes back in for defining the sets. The idea of starting with nothing and building up is problematic, since, in order to work, nothing has to be something, which goes against the plan (see Fridegesis and a counterarguments from Nagarjuna -- this is a mildly cheating objection). And, of course, set-forming means that almost immediately we are not dealing with nothing but with something, namely sets which are not empty (this is Cantorian set theory, of course).
I don't get how you see the problems arising, partly because I don't see the connection between what you say and set theory nor between those and different kinds of languages. I suppose this is all clearer in a more detailed discussion.
I don't the the derivational stuff at the end either: what is the effect of compounding? what do the components mean in isolation?
janMato
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Re: World-Text

Post by janMato »

janKipo wrote:I'm not quite sure what a set-theory-inspired language would be like, distinct from a logic-inspired one.
Maybe me neither. I actually checked to see what people had to say about set theory-like things in Lojban and at least one person seemed to think lojban didn't do a good job of talking about sets-- ref http://balance.wiw.org/~jkominek/lojban ... 00452.html (like most lojban discussion, I didn't actually follow the content of what was said)
An ontology of only atoms and sets, with only identity, membership and inclusion as predicates?
That's why I said *set theory* inspired, and when I say "cargo cult"-like, I mean it. Ever seen pseudo equations, like, "Success is Inspiration Plus Work divided by Doubt Squared"-- That is a cargo-cult equation-- all the dress of math, but no actual math in it. If a real set based communication existed that rigorously stuck to the principles of graduate level set theory, then it would be a probably verbose communication system, hard, and probably limited to discussing the few things that set theory is very good at discussing. So the basic tools of a set theory inspired language would be lists of words, probably assigned to things that work like variables, pronouns or proper nouns, and then a bunch of statements relating those variables. Since it would be set theory inspired there would be a bunch of rules for expressing things like "everything in previously mentioned list A that isn't in B." That's 10 words in English, a suitably set theory inspired language should be able to do it in one or two.

re: nothing
I don't believe the world literally is nothing and I can't say I get what the emptiness theme is driving at-- maybe when I reach nirvana or satori it will be clear.
I don't the the derivational stuff at the end either: what is the effect of compounding? what do the components mean in isolation?
This is actually from an idea I got pondering toki pona's word lists. What if a different 100 words had been chosen-- what if they were chosen at random, what if they were mostly precise words? I think if they were chosen at random, we'd use the same cicumlocution strategies we use now to make up for missing short words. If the words were precise, we'd probably compound with words that mean "the complement of", i.e. pu == Islamic chapter vs pu taso nasin ala Islan taso nasin Puta == Sutra. So instead of building up a word from it's components (shiny rock container holds nasty food = spam), it would more often be subtractive (closest tp example I can think of, moli ala == alive)

nada = nothing
yada = silence
pan = famine, breadlessness
yada-nada = chit chat, conversation, yada = weakly "not", in the sense of a mirror opposite
wowa-yada-nada = serious conversation, wowa = just some intensifier.
pan-nanda = crumbs
wowa-pan-nada = a feast

Again, back to the hypothetical -- some of the words in tp are peculiar choices, yet we survive. What if they were all peculiar choices and they all meant variations of "nothing", silence, famine, sleep, peace, vacuum, etc. Coupled with the right derivational morophology, it could work.
janKipo
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Re: World-Text

Post by janKipo »

So 'nada' is polar negation (from Lojban jargon). I can see this working at least as well as the opposite.
While I can't explain nothingness (sunyata, at least), here is a sort of clue. In abhidharma a thing is what it is by virtue of not being something else, it gets it nature by being distinct, by drawing a distinction. Hence, what is not distinct is not something. The void is where things are not distinct from one another -- which is everywhere, since the distinctions we make are not real. See, I said I couldn't explain it.
I love the cargo-cult notion. It fits Lojban nicely (and tp too for that matter -- pidgin indeed!).
Lojban tends to avoid set-theory in the formal sense (and all math, for that matter). It uses Lesniewskian set theory in it quantifiers, but not overtly -- and not always reliably (it has a null-set, for example, in most popular discussions).
BTW the joke a couple of messages back about three Lojbanists walking into a bar did not go unnoticed.
janMato
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Re: World-Text

Post by janMato »

Ah! I finally understand this sunyata stuff (it's the everything is always changing (time) applied to space). As a concept it's about as complicated as closures in Javascript. Pity I don't feel the rush of enlightenment yet.

Shingon's world language-- I tracked this down. This is indeed a pre-Sassurean almost conlang. Pre-Sassurean because it borrows the non-Buddhist idea from the Indics that a sound (say, "a", meant something like "the universe") and that "a" in every word in Sanscrit also meant that. It was an explanation for the magical power of matras. Until Sassure came along and ruined the game and said that there was nothing doggy about dog or catty about cat and the labels could be switched and the individual sounds were meaningless.

Has Sassure ruined the possibility of a language where sounds and meaning were the same? Maybe a sort-of linguistics that follows all the rules except Sassure rules about sound and meaning, the same way a non-euclidean geometry follows most of the rules of science & our reality.
janKipo
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Re: World-Text

Post by janKipo »

There are any number of systems where the words are always right for the things -- given you accept a few axioms about what the sounds mean. And even those axioms need not be thought of as arbitrary in the Saussurean way, as many people have noticed the naturalness of certain sounds for certain ideas. The oldest clear case of this is Plato's Cratylus, which finds (surprise!) that Greek words are often natural for their concepts ('lithos' "stone" is hard and smooth, for example -- I am not sure what 'petron' "rock" is, though). And thse searches for naturalness seem always to end this way: my L1 has it pretty much right. Even onomatopoeia tends to come to the same result: each language hears the sounds of nature within the confines of its own system; if they can't get actual sounds "right". what can we expect for abstract notions?
(Sunyata is about everything always changing or being elsewhere or whatever but about there not being any things per se)
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