[Language] metric-ified English

[3_bit]

Now I really don't see how nobody has brought this to the world's attention.

I see(not) how entity(none, plural) bring(past-tense) to world(population, possessive) attention.

(The above sentence isn't properly processed by me, and as a result isn't in the language's current format)

The second line is a WIP of the language I've created, called Metrified English (the name is also a WIP). What I fail to understand is how for so long we have used this illogical language called English.

Ride => Rode (for past tense)

Bike => Biked (Should be boke, if you applied the same logic used in ride)

There's a lack of simple rules in modern-day English. But if you know some French like I do, you'll find there are a lot of flaws there as well (I believe the rules in French are even harder to grasp), such as having to write/pronounce a word a certain way based upon if you're addressing a friend, a parent, using the pronouns you, he/she, and we, etc. Rules like these are simple not needed. With my language design, you don't have prefixes or suffixes, mostly what I call "daughter definers" (a temporary name as well).

Below are a few examples. The top is in English, and the bottom in my variant.

I liked red apples very much.

I like(past; very) apple(plural; red)

You'll see that adverbs and adjectives are included with the words they describe or enhance. This is similar to French, how some adjectives follow after the noun. You'll also see that you no longer need to know all the potential future/past tense forms of a word, something very tedious to learn otherwise (like when to add -ed, has, etc.). I have also replaced all timing things with the words present, past, and future. These words themselves can be modified, should you want, to clarify.

I will walk my dog in 10 minutes.

I walk(future(10 minutes)) dog(I).

You'll notice here dog(I). The I shows that the dog belongs to you. When clarifying details you use the following order, abandoning whatever details you do not want or are not needed: (Ownership; Tense; Adjectives/Adverbs).

This is a quick language I threw together that's based upon English and I imagine can be learned in less than 1/4 of the time due to it's simpler rules and strictly logic-based structure. What do you all think of it? What rules should be changed?

Edited December 30, 2013 by 3_bit

[Tiberion]

So, when read aloud:

"I like open parenthesis past semicolon ..... very close parenthesis apples open parenthesis red close parenthesis"

Seems a bit much to say you liked very red apples at some point in the past.

And if you omit the symbols: "I like very apples red" - not only is it nonsense, it conveys no tense at all.

Sorry, I am afraid you don't have much here. You did demonstrate the logical way that English can be diagrammed though. And sentence diagrams are really a thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_diagram

Its been a good number of years since I was in primary school and learning grammar, but those were really useful in learning to properly associate words, at least to me. They are especially useful for visual learners, since a lot of language learning seems to be auditory.

[3_bit]

Yes... I need to somehow decide how to open/close parentheses in a sentence. (Maybe 2 special words for this)? As I said, it's a big WIP. However, I believe there needs to be a version of English without any confusing rules.

[bs1110101]

I like this idea, though it needs work, kinda reminds me of Lojban.

[softweir]

Yes... I need to somehow decide how to open/close parentheses in a sentence. (Maybe 2 special words for this)? As I said, it's a big WIP. However, I believe there needs to be a version of English without any confusing rules.

One of my programming tutors had a solution to this:

"(" = "bra" (short "a" so it doesn't sound like an item of feminine support.)

")" = "ket"

It might interest you to read up on the language Glossa.

As for why and how English came to be as it is: it is a mongrel of Celtic, Latin, and Greek with a great influence from the Germanic languages Anglo-Saxon, French, Norse and High german; and has imported tenses and other inflections from all of them. Very common words would tend to retain the tense and count inflections appropriate to the language they were borrowed from, while less common words would acquire inflexions from other languages.

So "child/children" retains a count inflection appropriate to Anglo-Saxon, "wheel/wheels" uses a count inflection borrowed from German (iirc), and "radius/radii" uses a Latin count inflection. Similarly, very common verbs tend to retain the tenses appropriate to their parent language. Rarer words tended to get shackled with the most common word-endings regardless of their parent language.

Because of this quagmire of inflexions, a great many have been dropped: almost all the root languages use(d) different inflections for the subject and object of a sentence, but this practice became extremely rare in English and has finally died out now that "who/whom" has vanished. ("Tell me, who struck whom?" "I know not who landed the blow, nor whom was struck.") Similarly, we have dropped person from verbs, so where Latin had "amo, amas, amat, amatus, amatis, amant" we have "I love, you love, he loves, we love, you love, they love" - we reduced it all to just "love/loves" and associate the verb with a noun or pronoun to sort out the person.

This has made English very much more dependant on word order - in Early English (Anglo-Saxon) it was possible to reorder a sentence and keep the same meaning just so long as each word retained its endings, and this was often done in poetry. In English, it is easy to change the meaning of a sentence by small variations, and is something that trips up newcomers to English quite badly.

On the plus side, it has made it extremely easy for English to import and adopt words from other languages. We may not be able to pronounce them in a way recognisable to users of their parent languages, but they don't get swamped by inflections that fight their native spelling.

[BlackBicycle]

OP: You funny fella. Ever since I started learning English ( I was seven at the time,) I have always been amused by the fact that English is in fact the most simple language on Earth. Or so I think.

I do suggest you get acquainted with Georgian for one. Now that's the one that is guaranteed to blow your mind. Or, for a simpler challenge, Russian.

That said, I was just about to write up the whole thesis. But I realised that your notion is based on a certain level of complication, beyond which you are not ready to go comfortably, even though you can. You then try to lower the generally accepted quality limit to the level that suits your comfort level. A desire like this does not deserve a complicated rebuttal - it deserves a simple "no".

I do not consider this a genuine desire to make the language better. I rather think it is yet another way to make things easier. Which is rarely the most advantageous direction to head in, in terms of future progress.

[Seret]

Now I really don't see how nobody has brought this to the world's attention.

There have been attempts at more rational constructed languages before (eg: Esperanto, Lojban). You could also argue that the various programming languages are constructed languages designed to be a man-machine interface.

I think before you sink a lot of time into designing a constructed language you would want to have a good hard think about what it's intended use is. The mere fact that organically grown languages are inconsistent and have weird rules doesn't simply mean that designing a new language that is completely consistent is a good solution to the problem.

[peadar1987]

Tenses are overrated. You can convey your meaning perfectly well most of the time by using the present tense and an adverb of time.

"Yesterday, I play KSP a lot"

"Tomorrow, I go for a walk"

In fact, in many languages, it's acceptable to ignore tenses, especially the future. Dutch does this quite often, and I believe French as well.

[Kulebron]

@OP: for parenthesis syntax, read on the Lisp programming language. It has most of the syntax built around parenthesis and tree-like structure.

The way you're heading is an effort by machine reading or learning, in which a program parses a human text and gets subject, verb, object etc, and in some cases can restructure the sentence while keeping the meaning.

The yet unsolved problem is to get to the meaning of sentences. Compare these two: "A kerbal landed on Jool as it's now confirmed." and "A kerbal landing on Jool is confirmed." In those two subjects are different, and so far machines can't understand that these two sentences mean the same.

Edited December 31, 2013 by Kulebron

[Kulebron]

This has made English very much more dependant on word order - in Early English (Anglo-Saxon) it was possible to reorder a sentence and keep the same meaning just so long as each word retained its endings, and this was often done in poetry. In English, it is easy to change the meaning of a sentence by small variations, and is something that trips up newcomers to English quite badly.

As a native Russian speaker I can say the meaning changes its tones and accents with word order. Word order also tells (indirecty) whether a noun is definite or indefinite (although few natives realize that). Word orders of poetry sound weird, despite being correct, and a great advantage is that in colloquial speech you can throw words in as they come to your head - then SVO relation does not change, but you get the logical accents blurred.

I guess this was true in Old English too.

[rpayne88]

Remember, English is a language. And (technically an improper word to start a sentence) languages were originally meant to be spoken. I could be wrong, but isn't writing just the way of recording the "spoken word" in a non-auditory format? Languages were not developed to make you twist your tongue to say a sentence.

[PakledHostage]

A great advantage is that in colloquial speech you can throw words in as they come to your head

Remember, English is a language. And (technically an improper word to start a sentence) languages were originally meant to be spoken.

A bit OT, but I found these two comments interesting... It may be technically improper to start a sentence with "And" or "But", but we do it all the time in colloquial speech. To me, it seems that the usage tends to come after a pause for thought. I sometimes use "And or "But" at the beginning of a sentence to try to convey a more causal tone.

It has often been said that email and similar written mediums are poor forms of communication because it is difficult to convey tone, and phrases often have multiple meanings. The image below is a classic example. A comma after the word "slow" would help eliminate the ambiguity in that road sign, but more generally, maybe written English needs a formal system of conveying tone? A sort of "for dummies" system that doesn't require you to be a poet to use it effectively?

Edited January 4, 2014 by PakledHostage
Clarified a point

[MC.STEEL]

This is reminds me of programing code.

Its interesting but modern languages are made that way because humans like to speak a language

that is streamlined and sound good acording to our current sense of what a language should sound like.

like look at this

-I will walk my dog in 10 minutes. i can say it in one breath and not a single hitch.

I walk(future(10 minutes)) dog(I) <--this last i is awquardly stuck together with dog. i suggest my or mine behind it.

this breaks the flow^

Overall i dont see the general populace getting a like on this,but i wouldnt mind.

Edited January 1, 2014 by MC.STEEL

[Camacha]

It sounds to me you are looking for something like an even more regular version of Latin, where word order is not very important, but the declension tells you pretty much everything you need about the function of a word. Modern western languanges are often easily learned when you know one of them, but that is just because they have a lot of resemblance to each other. There is quite a bit of weird stuff in there when you start analyzing it properly.

[Maxwell Comp]

You should look up Esperanto. It has no irregular conjugations, and I think it allows nouns to be conjugated. For example, in English we can say "it is raining" but we cannot say "it is summering", because summer is only a noun while rain can be both a noun and verb. I have heard that Russian allows conjugations of nouns, at least under certain situations.

Esperanto is probably the easiest language to learn, but English is not very difficult. The Romance languages are somewhat easy too. Slavic/Balken/etc languages from Eastern Europe are very difficult (I hear that Polish and Hungarian are particularly hard), and legend is that Icelandic is the hardest national language. I believe Russian has some of the most beautiful pronunciations of certain phrases, but unfortunately few people speak the language to sound beautiful. Not to denigrate French or Italian - they can sound beautiful (and often do) - but Russian has a handful of charming words that a Romance language couldn't produce.

Anyway, you will probably enjoy a mathematical field called Discrete Mathematics, as well as Propositional Logic. The things you have written are well thought-out.

[Nuke]

i think we should teach elementary students c++ as their first language.

[Kerbart]

Language is always a compromise in clarity and brevity. While a "mechanical" language might be 100% consistent and produce sentences that only understandable in one (intended) way, it also seems to produce a lot of redundancy that is not needed in real world languages.

"Aunt Barbara's apple pie was delicious!"

or

(type: pie, apple; consistency: baked; acquisition method: given; acquisition agent: family member, aunt, female, (name: Barbara;) pastry (verb: be; tense: present, single, third form) descriptor (type: taste; attitude: positive; quantity: delicious) emphasis (type: exclamation mark).

While the second sentence might be a lot clearer and convey more information, especially for those not familiar with the situation or context, the first sentence clearly wins in being shorter and easier to digest.

[softweir]

As a native Russian speaker I can say the meaning changes its tones and accents with word order. Word order also tells (indirecty) whether a noun is definite or indefinite (although few natives realize that). Word orders of poetry sound weird, despite being correct, and a great advantage is that in colloquial speech you can throw words in as they come to your head - then SVO relation does not change, but you get the logical accents blurred.

I guess this was true in Old English too.

That's interesting. I know that Welsh speakers of English tend to play with word order a lot, so they might say "the dog bit the cat", or "the cat it was the dog bit", or "bit the cat, the dog did" to get a similar change of emphasis - the first is a bald statement, the second emphasises that a cat was the victim and the third emphasises the misdeed of the dog.

That sort of thing is possible in English, but so very uncommon that using it leads to confusion and misunderstanding. Similarly, use of the somewhat more common passive voice ("the cat was bitten by the dog") is very confusing to the 30% less literate English users who much prefer the active voice ("the dog bit the cat").

... The image below is a classic example. A comma after the word "slow" would help eliminate the ambiguity in that road sign ...

http://www.roundrockpublications.com/images/photos-odd/05-SlowMenWorking.jpg

Or better still an exclamation mark after "SLOW". I believe German tends to use exclamation marks to indicate imperatives?

Edited January 4, 2014 by softweir

[Kerbart]

I believe German tends to use exclamation marks to indicate imperatives?

In speech they use it at the end of every sentence.

[CougarMagnum]

When I studied linguistics in college, we learned about “el ley del mínimo esfuerzo†or “principle of least effort†(my linguistics class was in Spanish), which postulates that no matter what, language will always evolve towards the path of least resistance. Language is an unstoppable evolutionary process. Efforts to contain it by streamlining grammar and creating perfect, unbreakable rules will always give way to this process. This is why ideas such as metric-ified English, though they make perfect sense and could theoretically be implemented, will never last more than a surprisingly short time. Rules will be broken immediately for the sake of efficiency, until it becomes standard practice and once again we are asking ourselves why our language is so illogical.

[softweir]

Indeed. Artificial (synthetic) languages simply don't take off, no matter how flexible or easy they are to use. This is because the adoption of languages is driven by how often potential users hear it being used or are forced to use it, not by how easy they are to use nor how ingenious their grammar is. These days in much of the world it is English, though in the Far East Mandarin is (by force as well as necessity) widely spoken and understood.

I have no idea how true this is, but Star Trek fans are heard to say that Klingon is more widely spoken than any other synthetic language!