#66372 Perfect Language

[Digit]

Question 66372 made me think of the TNG episode Darmok, in which the Tamarian race has a language that conveys concepts via a huge corpus of stories. For instance, when someone says "Shaka, when the walls fell," they mean to express that the current situation is bad or failing. I always wondered what language was used to teach little Tamarian kids the stories in the first place

Also funny,

I don't want to end this without mentioning dinosaurs. Maybe if they had had a perfect language they could have survived the huge meteor that obliterated their species. On the other hand, maybe they did have the perfect language and were able to escape from the Earth, leaving only the weakest links behind.

That's practically exactly the plot of a Star Trek Voyager episode called Distant Origin, in which it is discovered that dinosaurs from Earth developed to the point where they had spacecraft and left Earth many millions of years ago, before the Chicxulub impact but at the time of the episode, had forgotten their history (understandable, perhaps, given the idea of a society millions of years old) and denied their history in a way that made the main character mirror Galileo.

[mic0]

YAY! I love that that is a plot of something, and now I really want to watch that episode. Dinosaurs. So cool. Also, the language of the Tamarians that you said kind of sounds like the plot of the book Embassytown which came out last year and I'm meaning to read (not sure how to underline... x_X).

[Fredjikrang]

Yup Digit, that is the first thing that came to my mind when Mico started talking about dinosaurs!

[Fredjikrang]

I was wondering though. How would you all define the "perfect language?" That seems to me to be the biggest question here.

For me, to be perfect en si I think it would be a language that could express everything and anything.

[Digit]

I personally would value compactness and efficiency, even at the cost of extreme complexity. I wish my brain were good enough to become fluent in Ithkuil.

[Katya]

I was wondering though. How would you all define the "perfect language?" That seems to me to be the biggest question here.

For me, to be perfect en si I think it would be a language that could express everything and anything.

If you want a very philosophical answer to that question, I recommend In Search of the Perfect Language by Umberto Eco.

[Katya]

I personally would value compactness and efficiency, even at the cost of extreme complexity.

Compactness and efficiency of expression tend to come at the cost of comprehension.

[Marduk]

If you lose comprehension, then it isn't that effecient.

I just think we should start working on that whole telepathy thing.

[Dead Cat]

If you lose comprehension, then it isn't that effecient.

I just think we should start working on that whole telepathy thing.

But even then telepathy won't necessarily solve the problem since most people think in a language. After all, the best defense against unwanted telepaths is to think in a language they don't know.

[Marduk]

Yeah, then people will have to learn to think in thoughts. I keep saying it is much easier; maybe now people will listen to me.

[Portia]

I totes have tried making a conlang, and I found I valued strong grapheme-phoneme correspondence, no non-biological grammatical gender, and verbs marked for tense and person. My source morphemes seemed to skew heavily Romance (as did phonetics), while word order and syntax was probably more Germanic.

[Portia]

My pronouns were also temporally marked, which I'm not sure if that's a feature of any natural languages or not.

[Katya]

My pronouns were also temporally marked, which I'm not sure if that's a feature of any natural languages or not.

Can you give examples?

[Digit]

Honeybees have their own perfect language, with dances indicating the distance and direction to the food source. Circular dances indicate the location of sources of food up to one hundred yards away. Figure-eight dances, in which bees waggle their bodies with varying intensity, indicate distant locations, up to several miles from the hive. The angle of the dance relative to the vertical plane of the hive wall indicates the angle of the food source in relation to the sun's position in the sky. (e.g., dances directed upward mean the food is straight in the direction of the sun). The duration of the dance and the total number of waggles relate the distance from the hive to the food location, and the intensity of the dance communicates the desirability of the food.

[mic0]

Digit, that is a great example of the fact that a "perfect" language only needs to be perfect for your purpose. Afterall, the honeybee language wouldn't suit humans in any sort of abstract communications (unless we made some interesting metaphors or something). Interesting. I had to make a constructed language in my first ever linguistics class, and my language was super stupid. I just didn't know anything! Haha. But it did have awesome consonant clusters.

[mic0]

Sooo, I just recently read a book called "In the Land of Invented Languages," by Arika Okrent. It is available as an ebook through the BYU library.

Anyway, it was really good and discussed a lot of the constructed languages from the past, oh, 500 years or so. Pretty interesting.

[Katya]

Sooo, I just recently read a book called "In the Land of Invented Languages," by Arika Okrent. It is available as an ebook through the BYU library.

Anyway, it was really good and discussed a lot of the constructed languages from the past, oh, 500 years or so. Pretty interesting.

I love that book! She did some really great NPR interviews about it when it came out, so do a search on "Arika Okrent interview" if you want to listen to those.

[mic0]

I definitely will, thanks! About halfway through the book I decided I wanted to be her friend, and looked her up all over the internet. She sounds awesome. Hah, and the book was fantastic.

[Katya]

About halfway through the book I decided I wanted to be her friend, and looked her up all over the internet.

You can be her friend and I will be your friend and then I can be her friend by the commutative property. Yay!

I think her book was one of my favorite books I read last year (if not my top favorite). Of course, the problem with my favorite authors is that they've usually written just one or two books, so every time I discover a new favorite author, I read through everything they've written pretty quickly and have to move on.

[Gimgimno]

I just thought I would say that the telepathy comments reminded me of a different Star Trek episode, "Attached." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attached