aUI language

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jan Ote
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aUI language

Post by jan Ote »

From: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1385&p=7274#p7272
janKipo wrote:aUI is a philosophical language (the language of space, more or less literally) devised by Dr. John Weilgart of Decorah, Iowa sometime in the 1950's (or recalled then from a youthful exposure to it by little green men). Each letter (and numeral) has a meaning and words are constructed from the appropriate letters in the appropriate way (the name is the concatenation of space-thought-sound -- or maybe sound-thought, I'm working without a net here). It is one of the best developed philosophical languages of modern (relatively) times and a prize specimen for the difficulties of semantic prime languages (yes, better than tp, as you might imagine given that it has only 46 starting meanings).
Is aUI language really a one of the best developed philosophical languages of modern times?

Does aUI have any grammar (I haven't found any mention of the grammar) or is it a mere set of symbols (letters and digits) with assigned meanings? How it is better from concepts of Dalgarno, Wilkins, Leibnitz? I mean: toki pona is not a concept of philosophical language in this meaning, an universal perfect precise language. Almost all of Eco's The search for the perfect language is about the history of idea of perfect language, but toki pona is not the case. While aUI, as far as I can see, is.
janMato
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Re: aUI language

Post by janMato »

jan Ote wrote:Is aUI language really a one of the best developed philosophical languages of modern times?
I can only tackle the part about what would make something a good philosophical language.

If reality really was a hierarchical system of categorized things, then a language that reflects this order would be useful. I suspect the premise is wrong-- reality is just similar enough to an hierarchical system of categorized things that if one chooses a system, almost any system, it will be useful enough for talking about the world, but won't actually explain any part of it. So what to make of the fact that poop in wilken's language is downward-bodily-motion and in toki pona it is unpleasant-squishy-stuff ?

One of the things I though toki pona could be used for would be a Wilkin's style thesaurus. If I was looking for words (in English) similar to "bad", I'd flip to the ike page and start looking at all the compound words with ike at the head. If I found that snakes, woman and dangerous things were located close to each other on this hierarchy, I might imagine I've discovered something about reality (the philosophical language premise), or about our biases regarding reality (a sort of Saphir-Worph premise), or more likely that those concepts had to go somewhere and the patterns are largely due to chance.
jan Ote wrote:Does aUI have any grammar (I haven't found any mention of the grammar) or is it a mere set of symbols (letters and digits) with assigned meanings?
I figure even if a conlang writer hasn't written a grammar, the language will gain a grammar a soon as it gains a community and a reasonable sized corpus. I can't find any significant amounts of aUI written on the net. I did find jan Kipo's post of the lord's prayer http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:vZ3 ... clnk&gl=us
jan Ote wrote:...The search for the perfect language is about the history of idea of perfect language, but toki pona is not the case....
I've been musing about Cognitive Therapy and toki pona again. An anti-depression con-language based on cognitive therapy might encroach on the philosophical language turf because CT is about avoiding biased thoughts that set off sequences of thoughts that drag down the mood--such as thinking that something that happens is superlatively awful (when in fact it was ordinary and banal), that the future is likely to be unrewarding (when in fact we have no evidence one way or the other). The challenge is recognizing such thoughts is that they pop up effortlessly and it takes some thoughtfulness to recognize them. It seems it would be useful if there were obligatory grammatical markers that required one to categorize each thought into one of the various categories of though that CT finds relevant. That way, a thought would be instinctively noted as "awfulizing" by noting which negative superlative marker was used, or which attitudinal was attached to the future tense.
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Re: aUI language

Post by janKipo »

By "modern" I meant (basically) since WWII, when the present craze for conlangs began an upward arc after a relatively stable period (Ido and BE being the highs of that earlier, post-Esperanto, period). The dictionary/encyclopedia of the last edition of Weilgart's book contains over 3000 words and has a significantr number of pages o text. To be sure, aUI lacks a carefully stated grammar, though a fairly good one (roughly at the level of Setepo's PS for tp) could be induced from the several pages of examples. Weilgart apparently believed in a natural grammar (he says something almost like this someplace) and that would be colloquial (as opposed to academic) German, though heavily influenced by English. As a general rule about philosophical languages, grammar is not a priority and the "natural grammar" (the inventor's native or Latin or predicate logic in some form) takes over by default (the hypothetical language of Logical Positivism is an exception, of course, but can scarcely be called a language in the relevant sense). aUI had an official website for some time (maintained by Weilgart's daughter) but it did not have text; there is now a moribund chat group with a little more text, most of it not very good or interesting (my own offering from last August definitely included).
tp is definitely not meant to be a philosophical language in the technical sense, though it is sometimes claimed to embody a philosophy -- or at least aid it. Names for things are ad hoc assemblages of words to point out thing in the present situation, not definitions of their essence. It is an unfortunate habit of conlangers -- or rather of the followers of conlangs -- that they do tend to try for such essential definitions or something in that direction, rather than contextually useful descriptions (the Lojban 'le' to be desired against the 'lo'). Of course, to go off on another topic that keeps turning up, the lack of a shared culture (on the one hand, the other obstruction being the sharing of a too restricted culture) makes metaphorical short cuts hard to use for making better nonce names. Many a brilliant metaphorical name has been shot down by the blank unrecognition of people from even a moderately different background (I'm sure you have your own favorite examples).
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