UNDER CONSTRUCTION - PRE-RELEASE REVISON
Formatting and illustrations are stripped. Will update here as I go, and repost once completed.
Non-Linear Fully Two-Dimensional Writing System Design
By Sai
Version 0.5 – 5/01/06
Introduction
This project is an offshoot of an earlier one, "On the design of an ideal language". While I intend to finish that eventually, my interest for now is drawn to this particular aspect as it holds what I think is the most potential for real innovation.
For some years now, I have been mulling over the idea of a non-linear “fully” two-dimensional writing system (NLF2DWS for short). The idea is a hard one to grasp, and as of yet I am still not clear on all the details of how it would play out in practice, but I will try to explain as clearly as I can the various necessary and optional characteristics, features, and potential implementations that I do understand. I will also try to include a review of existing systems that I know of, to see how they compare to these specs; and to address the various arguments about the cognitive, pragmatic, and future consequences of it.
Before starting, though, I want to make a few disclaimers. I am neither the first nor the only person to work on a 2DWS, and I claim no especial right to the idea. Others have proposed other 2DWSs, which share and differ in certain properties. I do not wish to say anything bad about them, as themselves; I will only be talking about other systems from the perspective of my concept, developed here. I will reserve the term NLF2DWS to describe it (until I can come up with something more elegant). I encourage those who would like to develop related but different ideas, or to argue against mine on some sort of systematic grounds, to give different names to their concepts, that we may better distinguish an argument that agrees on axioms/specs (that is, the major specifications as outlined in this essay) from one that does not (and perhaps claims its specs will result in a somehow preferable result).
NLF2DWS does not refer to any particular implementation. It is a specification of conlang technology, not of an actual language. All examples I give here are intended solely as examples, and very simple ones at that; I am not particularly attached to them, and in fact believe that better (more elegant, more aesthetic, simpler, more integrative, more powerful, etc) implementations can be come up with to fulfill the primary goals. I apologize in advance for my lack of artistic skill.
I will try to distinguish between ‘necessary’ features – that is, ones that are absolutely critical to having a recognizable NLF2DWS – from those that are optional or probable (i.e. consequences of the only plausible implementations I can think of), or ones that fit my own aesthetic preferences. There are also several ideas discussed here that are not integral to NLF2DWS per se, but that I feel would work very synergistically with it.
If you understand what I am trying to do here, please feel free to suggest other ways to describe it that might get better at that gestalt; I’m not afraid of criticism. Please do be careful to distinguish whether you are talking about a better way of getting at the same idea, or disagreeing with the idea itself.
For the most part, the ideas I outline here are my own (though come up with independently by others as well), and I take the responsibility for them and for any errors. I’d like to express my thanks to my friend Neil Herriot and to the many people on the Brown University CONLANG mailing list for their help in fleshing it out. I would also like to point you to Ted Chiang’s short story Story of Your Life, as the language “Heptapod B” sketched therein is very much in line with what I am looking for.
What I describe here is, I believe, a very dramatically different thing from (nearly) any existing system of writing, note-taking, or displaying information. It is intended first and foremost to be a written language. Its ability to be rendered into speech is a very low priority to me; no sacrifices will be made for the benefit of speech, if they impede a more powerful or elegant writing system. In fact, I don’t consider its ability to render speech, or to be spoken, to be particularly critical; I flatly reject the concept that writing systems need be mere codes for speech, though this may indeed be true for the vast majority of natural-language writing systems.
I also reject the notion that all humans always “think” in language – that is, that the original form of thought is of the same form and structure as speech. I know people whose “thought” is experienced as speech, or text, or moving images, or more exotic stuff. I personally do not think in any of the languages I know, except when rehearsing a conversation or when fixing something for memory – and the latter only because I have no other viable methods available for symbolizing thought. My normal thought process is much more abstract, occurring as a sort web of cascading ideas; sadly, there is at present no way for me to properly express or encode this. A NLF2DWS would address this need, and this is discussed towards the end of this paper.
I feel that NLF2DWSs have some extremely interesting implications and applications, as I will describe later. I trust that this paper adequately conveys both the idea itself, and why I consider it so significant.
As a footnote that I will not elaborate on for now, I would like to point out that, if successful, a NLF2DWS would present a potentially serious attack on Chomskian ‘embedded [linear] syntax’ – or at least require a major revision of it – and to some extent support a more cognitive linguistics style, neural theory of language.
Theory & high-level concepts
Non-Linearity (NL)
Non-linearity is the defining feature of a NLF2DWS – but in some ways, it is easier to describe what this is not, than what it is.
It is not “non-linear” in the sense used on the Wikipedia entry titled “non-linear writing systems”, or in the dictionary.
It is not the sort of quote-unquote “non-linear” arrangement as in Hangul (the Korean writing system), as Hangul could for all purposes be rephrased in terms of a purely arbitrary set of symbols, with completely linear syntax and semantics, with a large but easily derived symbol set (i.e. one for every possible syllable). Not to mention that Hangul could just be rearranged as if it were a normal alphabet composed of its jomo (letters).
It is not a “tree” format, in the computer science sense (it is a multigraph). It is not a simple re-traversal of any linear writing system; e.g. the sort of “sentence structure diagrams” taught to elementary school kids, nor the parse trees and ‘surface vs. deep structure’ trees of grammarians.
Nor is it a “grid” format in any sense (though a grid design could be called “two-dimensional”), because a grid creates severe constraints on the range and potential connections of elements – in addition to being, in my opinion, very inelegant. This is not about elements being placed in particular ‘slots’ on the paper, but about them having particular kinds of interconnections amongst each other.
In fact, I believe I can say that it is not possible, short of crippled or very simple specialty cases, to directly convert a linear writing to a non-linear one without either loosing a lot of meaning (NLàL), being extremely inelegant by virtue of failing to take advantage of better design (LàNL), or becoming functionally incomprehensible (e.g. the list format in which an Nth-degree array is stored in the C programming language).
So, what is non-linearity?
At its core, NL has to do with how concepts are arranged, both on physical paper and in their more abstract form. A NL system is a multigraph; its components are, or can be, extremely interconnected. There is no single traversal method, though there may be some conventional ones. There may not be a ‘traversal’ method at all, as such; I’ll deal with that under ‘psychological ramifications’ below. A road map is a form of non-linear writing.
Non-linearity is a completely suffusive feature of a NLF2DWS. If what you are looking at is only trivially NL, then it’s probably not what I want. This means that at minimum it affects the syntax and semantics of the language, and ideally would affect the morphology, concepts used, and the very nature of certain ‘speech acts’ such as jokes and story-telling. (I’ll elaborate on that below.)
There are essentially two major forms of NL that I can think of as being plausible implementations: node-and-connection (N&C), and massively fusional (MF). I will describe them separately, but I take it for granted that any real, useful implementation will likely be a combination of both.
Under N&C, certain kinds of concepts would be ‘nodes’ – analogous to ‘roots’ in a polysynthetic language. These would then be connected to each other in various ways; these connections would likely vary in form and function, much like a kind of syntactic ‘morphemes’. Visually, a good first approximation is the standard image of a neural network – a bunch of words connected by lines.
Under MF, while there might still be ‘roots’, the morphological changes would be more integral (e.g. changes in thickness, orientation, color, shape, etc). Related nodes might be fused together in various ways – creating, for larger cases, a very large entity that on first glance appears to be a single (albeit complex) symbol, whose subparts are only discernable on closer examination. Single strokes would be part of multiple subparts; it would be difficult (if at all possible) to give firm dividing lines between where one ‘character’ ends and another begins.
MF, in my estimation, would be a more elegant but more difficult form to implement. (MF is also the kind described as Heptapod B.)
Another key feature of this version of NL is that, in principle, any element should be able to connect to any other element, so long as it is a semantically plausible / meaningful connection – and for certain kinds of connections, this may mean multiple simultaneous connections. E.g., when describing what you ate last night, there are multiple patients of that verb – all of those would connect directly to the verb.
Note that it is entirely possible to have recursive loops clearly laid out with this – in fact, it’s one of the tests for non-linearity. For example, “event A causes event B causes event C causes event A”. In a linear system (like the preceding sentence), you have a sort of conceptual connection between head and tail of that list that you fill in mentally; in a NL system, it forms a simple triangle (or more complicated structure) with causal links and immediately obvious circuits.
All other features I am about to describe are, in my opinion, optional. That is, they do not define a NLF2DWS. However, I do believe that they would be present in any good NLF2DWS. Unless mentioned otherwise, I will be describing them in the context of a N&C framework. They apply equally to one that is more fusional; this is a convenience for the sake of easier comprehension.
Sub-symbolic nonlinearity & component exposure
In all current writing systems (with some small exceptions), individual symbols are entirely arbitrary. Not solely in the sense that words are arbitrary symbols compared to the concepts they represent – I have no issue with that, and believe it a necessary fact of human cognition – but that you could in principle replace every symbol with a serial number, or random geometric shape, and have no worse a system. This would be perhaps somewhat inelegant, but it would not in the least impair syntax, semantics, etc – and only marginally affect comprehension once acclimatized to.
Hangul is one exception. Its characters are made up of sub-symbols, which are in turn completely standard alphabetic symbols. They are combined in a set way to make a syllabic symbol. This could be easily reconfigured as a string – simply disregard the stacking rule – and thus does not count as non-linear in any sense discussed here.
Chinese characters (and Mayan, and Egyptian, etc) are another. They are derived from pictographs, but regularized and made highly iconic. Many characters are combinations of other characters – e.g. “forest” being three “tree” symbols, or “love” having the character for “heart” at its base. While this is not ‘nonlinear’, it is compositional in a somewhat better sense, and their arrangement does matter (e.g. some characters flipped upside down do exist as completely different characters). Its composition, however, is entirely unexposed. Every character could effectively be replaced by its serial number, with the comprehension none the worse; this is in fact exactly what a letter in Chinese looks like, if you read its Unicode version – just a long series of serial numbers.
My concept of characters in a N&C paradigm NLF2DWS would have each character be not just visually different, but have part of its semantic functions encoded in its actual form. For example, a relatively simple verb like “eat” (assuming for the moment that its ‘semantic roles’ are structured as they are in English) has two main related concepts – an entity doing the eating, and the entity eaten. Therefore, the symbol for it should likewise have “attachment points” (APs) that are symbolically related to their roles – either on a character-by-character basis, some sort of systematic method (e.g. a ‘standard’ way to designate the ‘patient’-attachment-point), or (again, most likely) a combination.
Why is this important? First, in a simple sense, it is analogous to kerning in linear fonts. Without it, all characters take up as much ‘space’ as the largest character, even if they do not use it.
Second, it helps the ease of comprehension of the system. Though symbols are still, well, symbolic, the subparts easily designate the various roles, changes within the frame structure, etc., that are important for understanding the idea. The symbols need not be composed of subcomponents that synthesize to create the overall meaning (as in Chinese), though this would be a good thing, for the sake of mnemonics.
Having the roles ‘exposed’ in this manner makes easily clear why a sentence such as “he said to her” would be ungrammatical – it is missing the required element of what he said. Changes in role requirements – e.g. those created by ‘middle voice’ and ‘passive voice’ – would be visually represented as a simple presence or absence of those attachment-points, or as some modification to them to have them be obviously optional, or obviously implicit / unattachable.
A further elaboration of this concept would have individual symbols represent, not ‘words’ in the traditional sense, but frames themselves. For example, one can represent the ‘commercial transaction frame’ – in which a seller and a buyer exchange goods for money – and many related terms quickly become simple alterations of it. Buy, sell, exchange, sale, lease, lend, borrow, rent, cost, store, salesperson, haggle, etc. as well as aspectual differences (be in the middle of a transaction, have completed, start it, etc), are all fairly obvious and simple morphological changes to particular nodes, or to the position / orientation / shape of APs within the structure (e.g. putting the ‘goods’ AP closer ot the ‘buyer’ or the ‘seller’ to indicate its present ownership, or another change to indicate posession). This has the potential to reduce the required lexicon by about one order of magnitude, while simultaneously making it more analyzable, intuitive, and easily ‘glanced’ (see below for that).
Levels of detail (LOD) / “Zoom”
When you look at a picture, a map, or any visual scene, you first become aware of a sort of broad-stroke version of it. That is, you can see where large objects are in relation to each other, where they are in relation to boundaries, what objects are connected, etc. Look more, and more closely, and you begin to make out more detail about all of these, and perhaps to see smaller connections also that may not have been immediately apparent.
A NLF2DWS has the potential to implement this.
The key criterion is that, as you look at a large writing from different ‘zooms’, you easily make out different structures. Zoom all the way out, and you should see the flow of major arguments, of major figures interconnected by (at this level of detail) certain gestalts of connection. Step in more, and you see what exactly those connections are; perhaps some description of the major figures involved; a footnote or tangent here or there; etc.
This would also correspond to different ways of thinking about a problem, or a question, or a story – the fully-zoomed-out version is the “executive summary”; the fully zoomed-in one is some specialist’s version of how some particular sub-detail is implemented.
A further elaboration – one that would likely require a rather ingenious designer – would have the zoomed-out, low-fi versions of a cluster of happenings “look like” its overall meaning. E.g., a detailed description of a war could look like the character for ‘war’, or symbolize the results, or perhaps be organized in a different level of symbols – meta-symbols, as it were, whose individual ‘strokes’ are whole ‘sentences’. (This is somewhat analogous to the effect of pointillist art, if it were made such that the component pieces themselves related to their little part of the overall picture.)
Implementation Details
Types of connections in a N&C structure
A nodes & connections structured NLD2DWS would need several different kinds of connections. These take the function of copulas of course, but also of more “meta” semantic connections as well – the kind that in normal writing systems would be exemplified by a concept outline, a “flow of argument”, speaker interaction, etc.
“Copular” connections
(Taken from Describing Morpho-Syntax, by Thomas Paine)
Six basic forms of copulas are:
• equation
• attribution / description
• proper inclusion / subset
• locational
• possessive
• existential (unitary operator)
Each of these can be, in the most obvious case, a line connecting A and B, with different squiggles on the line for the different types of connection.
Of course, most languages do not distinguish between all of these different forms, and as a result have a certain amount of ambiguity – e.g. “John is a teacher” could be an equation, description, or subset. A NLF2DWS need not necessarily make as many distinctions as are possible to make.
Connecting two nodes A and B (or in the existential case, just marking A) with those would create analogues of the sentences:
• A is the same thing as B
• A is B-like / described by B
• A is a B
• A is located near / with / in / on / etc B
• A is B’s
• A exists / there is (an?) A
Less obviously, one could write these copular connections in visually symbolic / intuitive ways – for example, inclusion/subset relationship could be identical to a Container schema, and have the set literally “contain” the subset (as in, e.g., Fig. 5).
Of course, just as with normal languages, there is a lot of variation even within this – e.g. different types of possession (alienability, for instance), and that would be up to the individual NLF2DWS to decide on.
Conceptual connections
• Causation (A ‘causes’ B)
• Theory / data (A ‘supports’ B)
• Argument structure (A is the main idea, B C D are supporting points, etc)
• Source attribution (A is according to / seen in / etc B)
• Emotional / experiential association (A ‘brings up’ B)
• Generic association (A has some unspecified relation to B)
Primary image schemas
• Container
• Source-path-goal
• …
Meta-connection changes
• Metaphoricity – this connection is being used metaphorically / metonymically (could be dropped for implicit / poetic use)
• evidentialiality – this connection is believed to be true because I perceived it / B said so / it’s tautological / it was always true before and probably still is / etc.
Long-distance connections
If all connections are essentially lines directly connecting point A to point B, then you have some potential problems.
First, you can have ‘collisions’ – that is, connecting lines being forced to cross each other because there are too many of them. While there are various ways this could be made to be relatively easy to make out (circuitry diagrams do so), with enough of them, this would get to be fairly messy.
Second, having point-to-point connections would somewhat constrain the potential distance of any particular connection. If, for example, there is one central item which many others refer to (e.g. the main character of a novel, or the main point of an argument), you will both have potentially excessive density around that central item. Also, physically far-away ones will have to have a connecting line that wends through a large number of symbols – which is both confusing in terms of what connects to what, and could cause further collision problems.
Thus, it would probably be wise to have some sort of “remote” connection method. I can think of three: pronouns, hashing, and pointing.
Pronouns are the closest to normal language. Instead of connecting A to B, you would connect A to one of some closed set of symbols that stands for B. E.g., it could be a symbol that stands for a person, or a concept, or some other grammatical class of the language.
Hashing is a more advanced form of pronouns. Rather than be closed-class, a ‘hash’ pronoun would look like its target, but a somehow (systematically) simplified version of it – stripped down so that it is recognizable, but does not necessarily encode as much as the original.
Pointing is visual – it could be as simple as an arrow pointing in the direction of B. It could have some additional modifications to make the target easier to spot – e.g. the physical distance to target, or some info about the target (like in the pronouns).
Types of connections / modifications / fusions in a MF structure
Orientation
Shape change (= meta-symbols?)
Fusion
Problems & ramifications
But I like my linearity!
This is the first thing most people will go to when reacting to the idea of a NL language: how are you going to tell a story? Teach? Describe a sequence of events? Make an effective argument?
It can be easy to be dismissive of this issue, in both directions. I’ll break it down into a few subcomponents.
Time is linear
Barring some quibbling about it, yes it is. And indeed, most of our experiences happen within time – stories, for example, tend to be of the format “A happened, then B, then C and D and E”. (Viz.: “boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy looses girl”)
However, there is a bit of a conflation happening here – the fact (that I do not dispute) that certain sequences are linear, and the idea that an effective story is therefore told in the same manner as it is experienced. That is, our paradigm of storytelling – movies, oral histories, novels, etc – has since forever been one of essentially leading the listener through the events, as if they were experiencing them for themselves (or as if watching them).
To write a sequence of events, you will need some sort of (linear) connection. This is true.
To write a causal chain, you may not. Indeed, many causes are circular – viz. Greek drama, or most psychological problems – or at least multithreaded. The latter could result in something that, while progressing more-or-less linearly, would still be very interwoven over its course – and thus would benefit from a NLF2DWS.
Stories / arguments are linear
In the linear language we are used to, if you want to make a point, or tell a story, or teach a skill, you need to control the sequence in which the target receives information.
For example, in teaching, you ensure that a student has learned a basic concept before teaching something that “builds upon it”; definitions before arguments; etc. In storytelling, you have a “story arc” – setup, tension building, climax, release, resolution. In rhetoric, you handhold the target through a series of logical steps, intended to ensure that the argument is sound and inescapably true. To tell a joke, you need the setup and then the (correctly timed) punch line.
Some of these, in fact, can be ‘spoiled’ by being told out of order – ruining a joke or a novel.
I don’t wish to say that there is no merit to this. In fact, fine control of how to present information to the best effect has become somewhat of an art form. It is well and good within its own context. A NL writing system, however, is not its context.
A logical argument, nonlinearly, is a rather straightforward thing. You lay out your asserted causal links directly, add links to the data you claim supports those assertions, or subdivide particular assertions into sub-parts that are themselves miniature versions of the whole. It would all fit together quite nicely and explicitly, and be potentially much easier to understand (and see the holes in) than when presented linearly.
A story, on the other hand, would likely be something very different from the sort that we know now. One way to describe a truly effective linear story, poem, or joke is that it is good by virtue of an appreciation of the skill of its sequencing, in addition to the effectiveness of the various imagery used.
A nonlinear story would derive its cleverness from the skill of its arrangement. Realizing that the reader can start anywhere they like, and traverse (or random-walk) the writing in any manner they like, the equivalent of a ‘punch line’ would be a sort of gestalt appreciation that comes from understanding how the various parts are interconnected, or how the microcosm fractally reduplicates the macrocosm, or as yet unforeseeable other aesthetics that may develop.
[TODO: elaborate. Perhaps an example?]
How would you fit it into a book?
You wouldn’t, preferably. At least, not one of the kind we have now.
Books work for linear languages because they do not care how they are divided up. A nonlinear language would suffer from being chopped up into 8.5”x11” (or otherwise-shaped) chunks.
While we can, of course, devise methods to make this chopping less traumatic, a better method would be to have a more dynamic system –e.g. a computer-interactive one. These already exist, for other things; see for example the “visual thesaurus”. To navigate, you can zoom in or out, follow links, jump around in the net, set certain levels of zoom to “fuzz out” so as to lower clutter, etc.
Smaller examples, of course, might well fit on one page – or one wall – and the desirability of a dynamic reading interface would not pose a problem. Or one could work with a static ‘zoom’ of the sort seen in “pointillist” photo-collages, and vary the reader’s distance, use a magnifying lens and small printing, or etc.
Features
- suffusive nonlinearity
- Principle of Iconicity at subsymbolic (but still abstract!) levels
- Other elements from ODIL?
- Frame foregrounding
Psychological ramifications
- traversal method (or lack thereof)
- cognitive maps
- activation-spread analogy
- Chunking limits – 7 +/- 2
Applications
- why bother?
- poetry, aesthetics
- better way to encode thoughts / notes
- thought experiment
o will it change the mode people think in? (eg convert away from thinking in speech/text -> …?)
o processing delay linear w/ rotation away from “canonical” if no particular canonical orientation?
§ Would people force one upon it?
o Spotlights vs. single-speck experience of thought
- Multithreading
o Conversations
o Multiple ‘storylines’ intertwining
o IM format?
- way to encode nonlinear thought
- laying out arguments semi-flowchart-style
- easy skimming, easy ‘at a glance’ understanding
- potential research
- spoken-language agnostic
o potential for a true auxiliary language / interlingua?
- Glance-ability
- Art (embedded in normal art; use in scenery; use AS scenery; …?)
o Nonlinear poetry (= zen / contemplative?)
Future use
- dynamic systems
o user-responsive
§ change area looked at
§ change area not looked at
o sequence-controlled elaboration
o interactive stories / GUIs
- 3d+
- Simultaneous / cooperative writing
- HUDs
Problems
- time is linear
o temporal, ergo linear, processing
- sounds (e.g. aural or linear-written names)
- density of space usage
- Highlighting symbols – size, thickness, color, etc
o To create better outline-based glance recognition (e.g. word shape)
- Getting processing speed / method / experience similar to that of normal visual world
- Windowing (aka pagination)
- “hooks” (start/end/etc meta)
- Writer vs reader ease of use – usability with a simple pen, vs high-tech layout, vs machine-generated, vs…
o Layout prediction – one stroke being used in multiple characters
- ‘space-filling’ connectivity constraints
- Serialization for reading aloud
- Difficult for people who think linearly / verbally
- Orientation – is there an absolute (page-relative) up/down/left/right? If not, are all symbols symmetric, or arbitrarily rotateable?
- Editing – difficulty of inserting / deleting / etc
o Computer aided?
o Analogous to search/edit/insert/delete/iterate problem in database design?
Representing a gestalt
- = a hash????
- Metaphors, “pointing to meaning” (frames, etc; pain/death/marriage/…)
o Absolutely agree with words being abstract / iconic
Other systems
- glyphica arcana
- ouwiyaru
- ithkuil
- Heptapod b
- Pinuyo
- Zaum
- Inca - quippu
- rikchik
Related topics:
- Lacan – French psych, re unconscious being linguistic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacan
- Semantic network
- Frames (framenet, cognet)
- Information-presentation theory (graphs, etc)
- Circuit design theory
Formatting and illustrations are stripped. Will update here as I go, and repost once completed.
Non-Linear Fully Two-Dimensional Writing System Design
By Sai
Version 0.5 – 5/01/06
Introduction
This project is an offshoot of an earlier one, "On the design of an ideal language". While I intend to finish that eventually, my interest for now is drawn to this particular aspect as it holds what I think is the most potential for real innovation.
For some years now, I have been mulling over the idea of a non-linear “fully” two-dimensional writing system (NLF2DWS for short). The idea is a hard one to grasp, and as of yet I am still not clear on all the details of how it would play out in practice, but I will try to explain as clearly as I can the various necessary and optional characteristics, features, and potential implementations that I do understand. I will also try to include a review of existing systems that I know of, to see how they compare to these specs; and to address the various arguments about the cognitive, pragmatic, and future consequences of it.
Before starting, though, I want to make a few disclaimers. I am neither the first nor the only person to work on a 2DWS, and I claim no especial right to the idea. Others have proposed other 2DWSs, which share and differ in certain properties. I do not wish to say anything bad about them, as themselves; I will only be talking about other systems from the perspective of my concept, developed here. I will reserve the term NLF2DWS to describe it (until I can come up with something more elegant). I encourage those who would like to develop related but different ideas, or to argue against mine on some sort of systematic grounds, to give different names to their concepts, that we may better distinguish an argument that agrees on axioms/specs (that is, the major specifications as outlined in this essay) from one that does not (and perhaps claims its specs will result in a somehow preferable result).
NLF2DWS does not refer to any particular implementation. It is a specification of conlang technology, not of an actual language. All examples I give here are intended solely as examples, and very simple ones at that; I am not particularly attached to them, and in fact believe that better (more elegant, more aesthetic, simpler, more integrative, more powerful, etc) implementations can be come up with to fulfill the primary goals. I apologize in advance for my lack of artistic skill.
I will try to distinguish between ‘necessary’ features – that is, ones that are absolutely critical to having a recognizable NLF2DWS – from those that are optional or probable (i.e. consequences of the only plausible implementations I can think of), or ones that fit my own aesthetic preferences. There are also several ideas discussed here that are not integral to NLF2DWS per se, but that I feel would work very synergistically with it.
If you understand what I am trying to do here, please feel free to suggest other ways to describe it that might get better at that gestalt; I’m not afraid of criticism. Please do be careful to distinguish whether you are talking about a better way of getting at the same idea, or disagreeing with the idea itself.
For the most part, the ideas I outline here are my own (though come up with independently by others as well), and I take the responsibility for them and for any errors. I’d like to express my thanks to my friend Neil Herriot and to the many people on the Brown University CONLANG mailing list for their help in fleshing it out. I would also like to point you to Ted Chiang’s short story Story of Your Life, as the language “Heptapod B” sketched therein is very much in line with what I am looking for.
What I describe here is, I believe, a very dramatically different thing from (nearly) any existing system of writing, note-taking, or displaying information. It is intended first and foremost to be a written language. Its ability to be rendered into speech is a very low priority to me; no sacrifices will be made for the benefit of speech, if they impede a more powerful or elegant writing system. In fact, I don’t consider its ability to render speech, or to be spoken, to be particularly critical; I flatly reject the concept that writing systems need be mere codes for speech, though this may indeed be true for the vast majority of natural-language writing systems.
I also reject the notion that all humans always “think” in language – that is, that the original form of thought is of the same form and structure as speech. I know people whose “thought” is experienced as speech, or text, or moving images, or more exotic stuff. I personally do not think in any of the languages I know, except when rehearsing a conversation or when fixing something for memory – and the latter only because I have no other viable methods available for symbolizing thought. My normal thought process is much more abstract, occurring as a sort web of cascading ideas; sadly, there is at present no way for me to properly express or encode this. A NLF2DWS would address this need, and this is discussed towards the end of this paper.
I feel that NLF2DWSs have some extremely interesting implications and applications, as I will describe later. I trust that this paper adequately conveys both the idea itself, and why I consider it so significant.
As a footnote that I will not elaborate on for now, I would like to point out that, if successful, a NLF2DWS would present a potentially serious attack on Chomskian ‘embedded [linear] syntax’ – or at least require a major revision of it – and to some extent support a more cognitive linguistics style, neural theory of language.
Theory & high-level concepts
Non-Linearity (NL)
Non-linearity is the defining feature of a NLF2DWS – but in some ways, it is easier to describe what this is not, than what it is.
It is not “non-linear” in the sense used on the Wikipedia entry titled “non-linear writing systems”, or in the dictionary.
It is not the sort of quote-unquote “non-linear” arrangement as in Hangul (the Korean writing system), as Hangul could for all purposes be rephrased in terms of a purely arbitrary set of symbols, with completely linear syntax and semantics, with a large but easily derived symbol set (i.e. one for every possible syllable). Not to mention that Hangul could just be rearranged as if it were a normal alphabet composed of its jomo (letters).
It is not a “tree” format, in the computer science sense (it is a multigraph). It is not a simple re-traversal of any linear writing system; e.g. the sort of “sentence structure diagrams” taught to elementary school kids, nor the parse trees and ‘surface vs. deep structure’ trees of grammarians.
Nor is it a “grid” format in any sense (though a grid design could be called “two-dimensional”), because a grid creates severe constraints on the range and potential connections of elements – in addition to being, in my opinion, very inelegant. This is not about elements being placed in particular ‘slots’ on the paper, but about them having particular kinds of interconnections amongst each other.
In fact, I believe I can say that it is not possible, short of crippled or very simple specialty cases, to directly convert a linear writing to a non-linear one without either loosing a lot of meaning (NLàL), being extremely inelegant by virtue of failing to take advantage of better design (LàNL), or becoming functionally incomprehensible (e.g. the list format in which an Nth-degree array is stored in the C programming language).
So, what is non-linearity?
At its core, NL has to do with how concepts are arranged, both on physical paper and in their more abstract form. A NL system is a multigraph; its components are, or can be, extremely interconnected. There is no single traversal method, though there may be some conventional ones. There may not be a ‘traversal’ method at all, as such; I’ll deal with that under ‘psychological ramifications’ below. A road map is a form of non-linear writing.
Non-linearity is a completely suffusive feature of a NLF2DWS. If what you are looking at is only trivially NL, then it’s probably not what I want. This means that at minimum it affects the syntax and semantics of the language, and ideally would affect the morphology, concepts used, and the very nature of certain ‘speech acts’ such as jokes and story-telling. (I’ll elaborate on that below.)
There are essentially two major forms of NL that I can think of as being plausible implementations: node-and-connection (N&C), and massively fusional (MF). I will describe them separately, but I take it for granted that any real, useful implementation will likely be a combination of both.
Under N&C, certain kinds of concepts would be ‘nodes’ – analogous to ‘roots’ in a polysynthetic language. These would then be connected to each other in various ways; these connections would likely vary in form and function, much like a kind of syntactic ‘morphemes’. Visually, a good first approximation is the standard image of a neural network – a bunch of words connected by lines.
Under MF, while there might still be ‘roots’, the morphological changes would be more integral (e.g. changes in thickness, orientation, color, shape, etc). Related nodes might be fused together in various ways – creating, for larger cases, a very large entity that on first glance appears to be a single (albeit complex) symbol, whose subparts are only discernable on closer examination. Single strokes would be part of multiple subparts; it would be difficult (if at all possible) to give firm dividing lines between where one ‘character’ ends and another begins.
MF, in my estimation, would be a more elegant but more difficult form to implement. (MF is also the kind described as Heptapod B.)
Another key feature of this version of NL is that, in principle, any element should be able to connect to any other element, so long as it is a semantically plausible / meaningful connection – and for certain kinds of connections, this may mean multiple simultaneous connections. E.g., when describing what you ate last night, there are multiple patients of that verb – all of those would connect directly to the verb.
Note that it is entirely possible to have recursive loops clearly laid out with this – in fact, it’s one of the tests for non-linearity. For example, “event A causes event B causes event C causes event A”. In a linear system (like the preceding sentence), you have a sort of conceptual connection between head and tail of that list that you fill in mentally; in a NL system, it forms a simple triangle (or more complicated structure) with causal links and immediately obvious circuits.
All other features I am about to describe are, in my opinion, optional. That is, they do not define a NLF2DWS. However, I do believe that they would be present in any good NLF2DWS. Unless mentioned otherwise, I will be describing them in the context of a N&C framework. They apply equally to one that is more fusional; this is a convenience for the sake of easier comprehension.
Sub-symbolic nonlinearity & component exposure
In all current writing systems (with some small exceptions), individual symbols are entirely arbitrary. Not solely in the sense that words are arbitrary symbols compared to the concepts they represent – I have no issue with that, and believe it a necessary fact of human cognition – but that you could in principle replace every symbol with a serial number, or random geometric shape, and have no worse a system. This would be perhaps somewhat inelegant, but it would not in the least impair syntax, semantics, etc – and only marginally affect comprehension once acclimatized to.
Hangul is one exception. Its characters are made up of sub-symbols, which are in turn completely standard alphabetic symbols. They are combined in a set way to make a syllabic symbol. This could be easily reconfigured as a string – simply disregard the stacking rule – and thus does not count as non-linear in any sense discussed here.
Chinese characters (and Mayan, and Egyptian, etc) are another. They are derived from pictographs, but regularized and made highly iconic. Many characters are combinations of other characters – e.g. “forest” being three “tree” symbols, or “love” having the character for “heart” at its base. While this is not ‘nonlinear’, it is compositional in a somewhat better sense, and their arrangement does matter (e.g. some characters flipped upside down do exist as completely different characters). Its composition, however, is entirely unexposed. Every character could effectively be replaced by its serial number, with the comprehension none the worse; this is in fact exactly what a letter in Chinese looks like, if you read its Unicode version – just a long series of serial numbers.
My concept of characters in a N&C paradigm NLF2DWS would have each character be not just visually different, but have part of its semantic functions encoded in its actual form. For example, a relatively simple verb like “eat” (assuming for the moment that its ‘semantic roles’ are structured as they are in English) has two main related concepts – an entity doing the eating, and the entity eaten. Therefore, the symbol for it should likewise have “attachment points” (APs) that are symbolically related to their roles – either on a character-by-character basis, some sort of systematic method (e.g. a ‘standard’ way to designate the ‘patient’-attachment-point), or (again, most likely) a combination.
Why is this important? First, in a simple sense, it is analogous to kerning in linear fonts. Without it, all characters take up as much ‘space’ as the largest character, even if they do not use it.
Second, it helps the ease of comprehension of the system. Though symbols are still, well, symbolic, the subparts easily designate the various roles, changes within the frame structure, etc., that are important for understanding the idea. The symbols need not be composed of subcomponents that synthesize to create the overall meaning (as in Chinese), though this would be a good thing, for the sake of mnemonics.
Having the roles ‘exposed’ in this manner makes easily clear why a sentence such as “he said to her” would be ungrammatical – it is missing the required element of what he said. Changes in role requirements – e.g. those created by ‘middle voice’ and ‘passive voice’ – would be visually represented as a simple presence or absence of those attachment-points, or as some modification to them to have them be obviously optional, or obviously implicit / unattachable.
A further elaboration of this concept would have individual symbols represent, not ‘words’ in the traditional sense, but frames themselves. For example, one can represent the ‘commercial transaction frame’ – in which a seller and a buyer exchange goods for money – and many related terms quickly become simple alterations of it. Buy, sell, exchange, sale, lease, lend, borrow, rent, cost, store, salesperson, haggle, etc. as well as aspectual differences (be in the middle of a transaction, have completed, start it, etc), are all fairly obvious and simple morphological changes to particular nodes, or to the position / orientation / shape of APs within the structure (e.g. putting the ‘goods’ AP closer ot the ‘buyer’ or the ‘seller’ to indicate its present ownership, or another change to indicate posession). This has the potential to reduce the required lexicon by about one order of magnitude, while simultaneously making it more analyzable, intuitive, and easily ‘glanced’ (see below for that).
Levels of detail (LOD) / “Zoom”
When you look at a picture, a map, or any visual scene, you first become aware of a sort of broad-stroke version of it. That is, you can see where large objects are in relation to each other, where they are in relation to boundaries, what objects are connected, etc. Look more, and more closely, and you begin to make out more detail about all of these, and perhaps to see smaller connections also that may not have been immediately apparent.
A NLF2DWS has the potential to implement this.
The key criterion is that, as you look at a large writing from different ‘zooms’, you easily make out different structures. Zoom all the way out, and you should see the flow of major arguments, of major figures interconnected by (at this level of detail) certain gestalts of connection. Step in more, and you see what exactly those connections are; perhaps some description of the major figures involved; a footnote or tangent here or there; etc.
This would also correspond to different ways of thinking about a problem, or a question, or a story – the fully-zoomed-out version is the “executive summary”; the fully zoomed-in one is some specialist’s version of how some particular sub-detail is implemented.
A further elaboration – one that would likely require a rather ingenious designer – would have the zoomed-out, low-fi versions of a cluster of happenings “look like” its overall meaning. E.g., a detailed description of a war could look like the character for ‘war’, or symbolize the results, or perhaps be organized in a different level of symbols – meta-symbols, as it were, whose individual ‘strokes’ are whole ‘sentences’. (This is somewhat analogous to the effect of pointillist art, if it were made such that the component pieces themselves related to their little part of the overall picture.)
Implementation Details
Types of connections in a N&C structure
A nodes & connections structured NLD2DWS would need several different kinds of connections. These take the function of copulas of course, but also of more “meta” semantic connections as well – the kind that in normal writing systems would be exemplified by a concept outline, a “flow of argument”, speaker interaction, etc.
“Copular” connections
(Taken from Describing Morpho-Syntax, by Thomas Paine)
Six basic forms of copulas are:
• equation
• attribution / description
• proper inclusion / subset
• locational
• possessive
• existential (unitary operator)
Each of these can be, in the most obvious case, a line connecting A and B, with different squiggles on the line for the different types of connection.
Of course, most languages do not distinguish between all of these different forms, and as a result have a certain amount of ambiguity – e.g. “John is a teacher” could be an equation, description, or subset. A NLF2DWS need not necessarily make as many distinctions as are possible to make.
Connecting two nodes A and B (or in the existential case, just marking A) with those would create analogues of the sentences:
• A is the same thing as B
• A is B-like / described by B
• A is a B
• A is located near / with / in / on / etc B
• A is B’s
• A exists / there is (an?) A
Less obviously, one could write these copular connections in visually symbolic / intuitive ways – for example, inclusion/subset relationship could be identical to a Container schema, and have the set literally “contain” the subset (as in, e.g., Fig. 5).
Of course, just as with normal languages, there is a lot of variation even within this – e.g. different types of possession (alienability, for instance), and that would be up to the individual NLF2DWS to decide on.
Conceptual connections
• Causation (A ‘causes’ B)
• Theory / data (A ‘supports’ B)
• Argument structure (A is the main idea, B C D are supporting points, etc)
• Source attribution (A is according to / seen in / etc B)
• Emotional / experiential association (A ‘brings up’ B)
• Generic association (A has some unspecified relation to B)
Primary image schemas
• Container
• Source-path-goal
• …
Meta-connection changes
• Metaphoricity – this connection is being used metaphorically / metonymically (could be dropped for implicit / poetic use)
• evidentialiality – this connection is believed to be true because I perceived it / B said so / it’s tautological / it was always true before and probably still is / etc.
Long-distance connections
If all connections are essentially lines directly connecting point A to point B, then you have some potential problems.
First, you can have ‘collisions’ – that is, connecting lines being forced to cross each other because there are too many of them. While there are various ways this could be made to be relatively easy to make out (circuitry diagrams do so), with enough of them, this would get to be fairly messy.
Second, having point-to-point connections would somewhat constrain the potential distance of any particular connection. If, for example, there is one central item which many others refer to (e.g. the main character of a novel, or the main point of an argument), you will both have potentially excessive density around that central item. Also, physically far-away ones will have to have a connecting line that wends through a large number of symbols – which is both confusing in terms of what connects to what, and could cause further collision problems.
Thus, it would probably be wise to have some sort of “remote” connection method. I can think of three: pronouns, hashing, and pointing.
Pronouns are the closest to normal language. Instead of connecting A to B, you would connect A to one of some closed set of symbols that stands for B. E.g., it could be a symbol that stands for a person, or a concept, or some other grammatical class of the language.
Hashing is a more advanced form of pronouns. Rather than be closed-class, a ‘hash’ pronoun would look like its target, but a somehow (systematically) simplified version of it – stripped down so that it is recognizable, but does not necessarily encode as much as the original.
Pointing is visual – it could be as simple as an arrow pointing in the direction of B. It could have some additional modifications to make the target easier to spot – e.g. the physical distance to target, or some info about the target (like in the pronouns).
Types of connections / modifications / fusions in a MF structure
Orientation
Shape change (= meta-symbols?)
Fusion
Problems & ramifications
But I like my linearity!
This is the first thing most people will go to when reacting to the idea of a NL language: how are you going to tell a story? Teach? Describe a sequence of events? Make an effective argument?
It can be easy to be dismissive of this issue, in both directions. I’ll break it down into a few subcomponents.
Time is linear
Barring some quibbling about it, yes it is. And indeed, most of our experiences happen within time – stories, for example, tend to be of the format “A happened, then B, then C and D and E”. (Viz.: “boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy looses girl”)
However, there is a bit of a conflation happening here – the fact (that I do not dispute) that certain sequences are linear, and the idea that an effective story is therefore told in the same manner as it is experienced. That is, our paradigm of storytelling – movies, oral histories, novels, etc – has since forever been one of essentially leading the listener through the events, as if they were experiencing them for themselves (or as if watching them).
To write a sequence of events, you will need some sort of (linear) connection. This is true.
To write a causal chain, you may not. Indeed, many causes are circular – viz. Greek drama, or most psychological problems – or at least multithreaded. The latter could result in something that, while progressing more-or-less linearly, would still be very interwoven over its course – and thus would benefit from a NLF2DWS.
Stories / arguments are linear
In the linear language we are used to, if you want to make a point, or tell a story, or teach a skill, you need to control the sequence in which the target receives information.
For example, in teaching, you ensure that a student has learned a basic concept before teaching something that “builds upon it”; definitions before arguments; etc. In storytelling, you have a “story arc” – setup, tension building, climax, release, resolution. In rhetoric, you handhold the target through a series of logical steps, intended to ensure that the argument is sound and inescapably true. To tell a joke, you need the setup and then the (correctly timed) punch line.
Some of these, in fact, can be ‘spoiled’ by being told out of order – ruining a joke or a novel.
I don’t wish to say that there is no merit to this. In fact, fine control of how to present information to the best effect has become somewhat of an art form. It is well and good within its own context. A NL writing system, however, is not its context.
A logical argument, nonlinearly, is a rather straightforward thing. You lay out your asserted causal links directly, add links to the data you claim supports those assertions, or subdivide particular assertions into sub-parts that are themselves miniature versions of the whole. It would all fit together quite nicely and explicitly, and be potentially much easier to understand (and see the holes in) than when presented linearly.
A story, on the other hand, would likely be something very different from the sort that we know now. One way to describe a truly effective linear story, poem, or joke is that it is good by virtue of an appreciation of the skill of its sequencing, in addition to the effectiveness of the various imagery used.
A nonlinear story would derive its cleverness from the skill of its arrangement. Realizing that the reader can start anywhere they like, and traverse (or random-walk) the writing in any manner they like, the equivalent of a ‘punch line’ would be a sort of gestalt appreciation that comes from understanding how the various parts are interconnected, or how the microcosm fractally reduplicates the macrocosm, or as yet unforeseeable other aesthetics that may develop.
[TODO: elaborate. Perhaps an example?]
How would you fit it into a book?
You wouldn’t, preferably. At least, not one of the kind we have now.
Books work for linear languages because they do not care how they are divided up. A nonlinear language would suffer from being chopped up into 8.5”x11” (or otherwise-shaped) chunks.
While we can, of course, devise methods to make this chopping less traumatic, a better method would be to have a more dynamic system –e.g. a computer-interactive one. These already exist, for other things; see for example the “visual thesaurus”. To navigate, you can zoom in or out, follow links, jump around in the net, set certain levels of zoom to “fuzz out” so as to lower clutter, etc.
Smaller examples, of course, might well fit on one page – or one wall – and the desirability of a dynamic reading interface would not pose a problem. Or one could work with a static ‘zoom’ of the sort seen in “pointillist” photo-collages, and vary the reader’s distance, use a magnifying lens and small printing, or etc.
Features
- suffusive nonlinearity
- Principle of Iconicity at subsymbolic (but still abstract!) levels
- Other elements from ODIL?
- Frame foregrounding
Psychological ramifications
- traversal method (or lack thereof)
- cognitive maps
- activation-spread analogy
- Chunking limits – 7 +/- 2
Applications
- why bother?
- poetry, aesthetics
- better way to encode thoughts / notes
- thought experiment
o will it change the mode people think in? (eg convert away from thinking in speech/text -> …?)
o processing delay linear w/ rotation away from “canonical” if no particular canonical orientation?
§ Would people force one upon it?
o Spotlights vs. single-speck experience of thought
- Multithreading
o Conversations
o Multiple ‘storylines’ intertwining
o IM format?
- way to encode nonlinear thought
- laying out arguments semi-flowchart-style
- easy skimming, easy ‘at a glance’ understanding
- potential research
- spoken-language agnostic
o potential for a true auxiliary language / interlingua?
- Glance-ability
- Art (embedded in normal art; use in scenery; use AS scenery; …?)
o Nonlinear poetry (= zen / contemplative?)
Future use
- dynamic systems
o user-responsive
§ change area looked at
§ change area not looked at
o sequence-controlled elaboration
o interactive stories / GUIs
- 3d+
- Simultaneous / cooperative writing
- HUDs
Problems
- time is linear
o temporal, ergo linear, processing
- sounds (e.g. aural or linear-written names)
- density of space usage
- Highlighting symbols – size, thickness, color, etc
o To create better outline-based glance recognition (e.g. word shape)
- Getting processing speed / method / experience similar to that of normal visual world
- Windowing (aka pagination)
- “hooks” (start/end/etc meta)
- Writer vs reader ease of use – usability with a simple pen, vs high-tech layout, vs machine-generated, vs…
o Layout prediction – one stroke being used in multiple characters
- ‘space-filling’ connectivity constraints
- Serialization for reading aloud
- Difficult for people who think linearly / verbally
- Orientation – is there an absolute (page-relative) up/down/left/right? If not, are all symbols symmetric, or arbitrarily rotateable?
- Editing – difficulty of inserting / deleting / etc
o Computer aided?
o Analogous to search/edit/insert/delete/iterate problem in database design?
Representing a gestalt
- = a hash????
- Metaphors, “pointing to meaning” (frames, etc; pain/death/marriage/…)
o Absolutely agree with words being abstract / iconic
Other systems
- glyphica arcana
- ouwiyaru
- ithkuil
- Heptapod b
- Pinuyo
- Zaum
- Inca - quippu
- rikchik
Related topics:
- Lacan – French psych, re unconscious being linguistic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacan
- Semantic network
- Frames (framenet, cognet)
- Information-presentation theory (graphs, etc)
- Circuit design theory
Page Summary
180milehug : (no subject) [+5] - tristissima : (no subject) [+4]
- oxytocinbliss : (no subject) [+7]
- nekura_ca : (no subject) [+1]
- (Anonymous) : An obvious thought [+1]
- (Anonymous) : Possible Example: SignWriting [+1]
- mungojelly : (no subject) [+3]
- (Anonymous) : possible typo /ingenuous/ingenious/ [+1]
Comments
(P.S. this is GreenBowTie from the ZBB.)
At some point. concrete examples will be very helpful. Right now though, perhaps you feel they might limit discussion too much?
If you don't, I'd like to see a first-pass N&C design of a nlf2dws 'sentence' that says, for example, 'When they arrived in the forest, he told her that now she must die'. (I know, I didn't make it easy! ;-) )
Another thought - you mention 'flowcharts' several times - have you thought of doing a (Jackson) 'structure diagram'? - an entity-relationship diagram? - a data flow diagram? - an (IBM) HIPO (Hierarchy Input Process Output) chart? The world of IT (né Automatic Data Processing) has many examples of different diagramming conventions for representing facts ('data'), their relationships and their structure.
Here is a problem for you: Supposing you invent a satisfactory technique for representing ('writing') the most complex sentence imaginable in a clear and unambiguous way, that takes just one PC screenful (or page of paper, papyrus scroll or clay tablet!). Now how do arrange a collection of these pages to form a 'book'? Must the connections between them be linear? Or might the connections be given by a network, say by the links of a folksonomy?
Regards,
Yahya
Flowchart etc techniques you mention I'm not familiar with - could you give me some references?
'Pagination' is something that I am going to address in this essay. In simple form - your question is moot because of its circularity; pages are a linear convention and should be abandoned. Asking to arrange a nonlinear system into pages is asking to re-shackle it; though one could make means of making that shackling less odious, it would still be unnatural.
Never heard of 'folksonomy'.
http://altuses4googleearth.pbwiki.com/f/n
http://altuses4googleearth.pbwiki.com/f/n
The first one could be translated : Bob drove Joe's plane from New Zealand to Australia.
The second one (from the title page of my conlang/script's grammar) could read : I, Chad Oliver, created this conlang, Nga'odi, as an experiment, and for fun.
I can't stress enough, however, that this is only one implementation of NLF2D Writing Systems. There are infinate other ways to do it; I posted this only as an illustration.
FWIW, "from", "what", and "to" are ill-defined; I think I know what you mean, but they're awfully language-specific. "Equals" also stands for one of a number of copular relationships (see essay or Describing Morphosyntax).
How would you suggest dealing with any of the more difficult issues re NLF2DWS, like eg having the web be more compact / less 'random mess of spaghetti' like?
Also, how would you work a conversation or story into NL form?
This was brought up when I posted the Conlang Con announcement and said I wanted to go :-)
So, yes. Howdy. Ping me on IM sometime.
Your name came up...but you seem interesting etc etc.
I want to get a newer group of LJ friends as the last episode turned into a catty disaster so, I am starting fresh :)
FWIW though - my LJ friends are all people I actually know IRL, or at least have talked to a bunch.
I had the nastiest email in response to me trying to find people interested in my interests..or just plain interesting.
How many times can I use that word? LOL
The email threw me anyways, and I thought perhaps I was stepping on toes or innapropriate.
I could tell several things by viewing yours though, you are a thinker, thus independant thinking as well, many varied cerbral interests, and seemingly good spirited.
I am sure I found you simply by doing a search for Massage as I did in the interest section.
As I think I said, I am in school for it etc.
I am glad you didn't tell me this:
"Subject: Who the hell are you?
I don't like spam. In case you are actually trying to make friends you should know...
I have no reason whatsoever to care about your massage schooling or your catty disaster. Seriously. You have to show interest to get interest - you didn't mention anything about me, you didn't ask any questions, and you didn't say what made me seem interesting or why you decided to add me as a friend.
The impression is you don't have listening skills and you're simply looking for people to talk at. Try one of those "how are my listening skills" tests online.
I'm blunt in the hope this information may be useful to you."
I figured I was somehow out of line and would offend people So I stopped trying to meet any since last night.
I like your linguistic post, I can't soak it all up for it's very techinical, but I took a fascinating class when I was in college and ate it up.
I respect your RL and private posts bit. Thanks again for being considerate.
Cheers
I have no objection to being friended of course, but as I said - my friends list is basically only people I actually know, or people who write really good stuff really often. And I don't read LJ hardly at all these days anyhow.
But hopefully mine is interesting enough to read. :-) Not that I can vouch for that, of course...
My experience was it was for many, mostly an online thing and they were open to meeting new people.
Perhaps that is where the negative is in my experience for if you know someone in real life, this LJ takes on a different aspect.
So, someone like me is a bit of an intrusion.
Makes sense.
So, in that case sorry for that. Boy I feel stupid LOL
I'll stick with meeting people in Massage Communities from here then.
May I ask though, you did receieve your liscense and decided to not pursue it?
Seems to happen often.
Granted we have a 600 hour program here and the loans itself mean kick but to pay them back and stick it out.
http://www.imieducation.com/
However for you, it's a trade you will always have under your belt.
Always good to have one or two of those to kick around!
But claiming they're your friend *already* is a bit weird.
Granted, I know most people have 'lj friends' like 'friendster friends' etc in a much more loose sense. That's okay for them. And of course, it's not closed-loop - I have met (and become friends with) people through LJ.
I didn't get a business license; never felt like investing the money, and I'm a few hours short depending on the city.
And yes, I have a few trades under my belt. :-)
Yeah no I wasn't assuming anyone was an instant friend.
It was 3 in the morning and I was tired and loopy from school. I had was just eager to get the ball rolling and just made a general statement wherein I was going down the list hoping those with actual schooling or eastern modality interests would want to share ideas and if not then just ignore my response.
This way keeping the flow of information and experiences.
Of course two present body workers did respond favorably and that's all I was getting at.
It's an "are you interested in exchanging ideas"
With some went down like a lead balloon LOL.
Lisence or not, it's a great skill to have and I bet enriched you.
Enjoy your weekend.
Peace out.
I just dropped by your LJ now to see if there was anything about this topic from the conference. Since this version is a couple of months old, I was wondering if there was an update to this now that the conference is done? I've made a few notes from this, but am interested to see the latest version first.
Thanks
Nekura
If you have any comments, I'd be interested to hear them.
I think the prescribed relationships between your elements (in the sense of 'prescriptivist' proper usage) would be articulable/encodable in terms of vectors, something like
EAT ->
VERB TRANSITIVE
IMAGE: GLYPH_1
SIZE: 1 UNIT
SUBJECT ARC: 255 DEGREES TO 285 DEGREES
SUBJECT RANGE: 0.5 UNIT
OBJECT ARC: 75 DEGREES TO 105 DEGREES
OBJECT RANGE: 0.5 UNIT
This would describe a glyph where -- if you're looking at it with the top of the glyph straight up -- the subject would be to the left and the object would be to the right.
Clint, a/k/a Virtue Incarnate
I'm not sure I understand the purpose of describing it in such a manner, though; it might be more amenable to computer processing, but I believe that a computer processing structure should be made *after* I have a good implementation of the language (or at least a solid idea of what it would look like), not before, to prevent implicitly being guided by what is easy to express in code rather than what is optimal for the writing system.
Also, I think that describing it like this removes the association between (in this case) the subject / object 'attachment points' and the actual design of the glyph; my intent would be for that not to be completely arbitrary, but for the glyph itself to somehow make those points obvious.
I thought you might want to look at it: http://www.signwriting.org.
Thanks,
Stuart Thiessen
sthiessen-------at=========passitonservi
I don't believe however that SW is nonlinear; it is a linear succession of somewhat complex encodings of hand & face motion, each of which represents the equivalent of a snapshot with some annotation of movement. It has no syntactic or grammatical nonlinearity beyond the *parallelism* of the individual compound symbols. And while parallelism (e.g. showing hands and face at once) is indeed good, it's not what I mean by non-linearity.
Sign language itself is mostly linear (albeit much more parallel/multithreaded than spoken languages), as it occurs over time. Indeed, any encoding of speech or sign will have this limitation. This is why my intent for a NLWS is *not* to encode speech or sign, but to create something primarily intended as a writing system, and only compatible with being spoken if it doesn't detract from that.
Thank you for your comments though, and please let me know if you have any more.
My conlang is designed to be written on paper. What you've called "attachment points" I've been calling in my conlang "nibs." The shapes of words include places where they pinch together and a line comes out-- those lines can be connected to other words, forming the grammar of the language.
I have only a few words so far, so I haven't been able to test my ideas very deeply, but my hypothesis is that very little grammatical structure should be necessary. It seems to me that most of the grammar of one-dimensional language is to compensate for the difficulty of connecting distant elements in the speech stream. Almost all of the connection in a two-dimensional language can be direct, as simple as a line extending from one place to another.
So I hope to get by with just this grammar: There are nibs on word shapes, representing roles in the relationship described by the word. Other roles and relationships can be added as a connected commentary to any word or part of the discourse simply by pointing to where you want to refer with one of a variety of arrowheads.
I'm in the early formative stages of this project, so I could make good use of any suggestions you might have. :)
One thing I'd strongly recommend is that you check out Ouwiyaru: http://ouwi.org / AIM ouwiyahu. He's way farther along than I in terms of actually getting something done; I'm still mired in theory. :-P
I'd be very interested to see what you've got so far; d'you have a website up yet?
I believe that you're wrong about grammar, though this may be because I interpret 'grammar' a bit more liberally. One of the main issues with just having line-connections is that you get spaghetti for any large composition (such as the amount of information contained in a typical English page of text, let alone a full novel's worth). AFAICT this is an intrinsic problem; if you want to go mathematical it's about topology and knot theory. But there are various ways to address it - zoom / fractalization; pronouns, pointers, and other forms of reference; canonicalization and grammaticalization of information that in e.g. English takes up space; etc.
This is something that will probably come up more once you start dealing with larger constructs, though. So you can probably get by as is for now, and deal with it organically once it's an issue.
A related one is that you'll probably (depending partially on aesthetic) want things to be as lithe and SNR-maximizing as possible. On this I'd highly recommend you read books by Edward Tufte; they are fast and easy reads, but get the point across (at a meta level) very well.
Do you have different types of nibs? How are they marked?
Finally, I'd recommend that you read up on metaphor and framing a la George Lakoff, if you're going to get into the nibs-are-roles thing. (Which, mind you, I think is a good thing to do. It can just be a bit complex.)
If you want feel free to ping me on IM; contacts in profile, or saizai on various IRC networks.
This is an idea about how to write in 2d. which I, mungojelly, who wrote to Saizai about this topic, am the on earlier. /---exploring lesser, Livejournal | | here. Pope Salmon. -- which | in order w is an excellent v to give h BBS. Mid-novem you a sense o have always ^ ber it se of how had strange names | ems, my h I've been back since my \ ow time f thinking. first handle | lies, eh? was Wyvern on my first| which was called The Wyvern's Lair.I had fun playing around with some new words & connecting them together, but I think it's more practical to explore the 2Dness with an established set of symbols, like English words/phrases. I've also been thinking about how Lojban could be adapted to a 2D form-- Lojban already has syntactic qualities which make it nonlinear at heart, so it's an easy fit.
2D in particular seems more appropriate for pen & paper than for electronic communication. If we're going to go multidimensional with electronic support, I don't see why we'd stop at two. Of course the two-dimensionality is really being used as a way to access many-dimensionality, anyway, isn't it? (If it's a matter of connecting things in arbitrary directions, and not of the left-right-up-down orientation of things.)
stevo