Saturday, September 26, 2015

Essentiali

Imagine a language where a word's spelling is a clue to its meaning.

That sort of exists, you might say. Latin roots, in languages like English. Radicals, in languages like Chinese.

But we still have to straight up memorize thousands of words blindly. Not in Essentiali. Each letter is assigned a (very broad) meaning. To create words, meanings are chosen and pieced together in a pronounceable way. Then, a suffix is added to denote whether a word is a noun, adjective, etc. In common speech, the suffix is dropped if it would be unambiguous to do so. The tense is added on the left. Words are arranged vertically and the columns are read from right to left.

Obviously, as meanings get more specific, they will get longer (and if they don't fall into categories but meh), but I think of that as a plus because words that are more specific tend to be less common, and common words should be shorter. They are in most languages anyways.

There are, of course, exceptions. Some words (such as if and then) are neither suffix nor letter, and some words (such as the names of sentient organisms) are phonetic approximations of borrowed words.

So far, I have yet to run into trouble, but then, I haven't made many words.

The alphabet, with IPA equivalents:



1 comment:

  1. I find this extremely entertaining since it correlates so well with Plato's theory of forms. It seems that you're trying to reduce every single word (and in turn every object it refers to) to pure, otherwise irreducible units; in this case, letters. Plato did the same thing, but left the pure, irreducible objects defined as "forms". I might even jokingly say that you've left out the Form of the Good because of the uncanny similarity here. I actually think it's fantastic that you've manage to condense Platonic forms into an actual alphabet, just incredible. I don't know how Plato would've felt about you trying to enumerate all of the forms, but I think it's great.

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