I think we should invent a new language for humanity. Ive tried to design one a little bit.
There are tons of ways to describe the sounds that a human mouth can make, and you can find very detailed nomenclature about it but generally it is useful to think of a spoken language as consisting of a set of phonemes, which are fundamental sounds. I looked at a list of the most common phonemes and just decided to use the top 20 in order to make the pronunciation and recognition of all the sounds of this new language as easy as possible. Between all the languages of the world, there is considerably more overlap of some sounds than others, so I believe it’s useful to use the most overlapped ones.
Most languages consist of open phonemes and closed phonemes. Most languages include words that end on a closed sound like the word “stop.” Notice that actually saying this word without making an open sound and the closed “p” sound is impossible. In reality the word sounds like “stop-ah” because of the physics of the mouth. In this new language, all words start with a closed sound and end with an open sound, for example “gah” “dah” “dee” “nee” and so on.
If you take a bunch of common closed sounds and open sounds, and have none that sound similar to the others in any way (distinctive sounds are necessary for easy learning and understanding by learners because after a certain age, discriminating between similar sounding sounds is impossible.) then you have a list that can create around 40 or 400 “base combinations” of one closed sound and one open sound, like the examples above. I can’t remeber the exact number but I have it all written out somewhere. Limiting words to 20 or 30 combinations of these base combinations, you have a word space that is larger than a human can memorize probably, even after cutting out all the bad combinations like “dee-dee-dee-dee-dee.” So in the end you have words that might look like “nah-kah-too-nigh.” You give up compactness compared to English but gain advantages in other areas. Namely clarity and truer correlation between how a word is spelled and pronounced which is key for learning a new language. Also it’s impossible to have something like two words that sound the same like “two” and “too.”
The language would cross of several base combinations as I mentioned earlier. These singletons “dee” “dah” “nee” and so on, would not have any meaning. The next level up, two of these combinations together like “dee-nee” or “too-goo” would have meanings that are fundamental and common and would act as root words to form other higher level words just like in English with Latin and Greek. So for example the root word “dee-soo” means to finish, to terminate, to end. There is a joke in there by the way. And the root word “vigh-tah” might mean life, animation or prosperity. So the word “dee-soo-vigh-tah” might mean death. And so on. I think the root word system is very good in English and doing it very deliberately in a new language would be good.
Often in English we make up words with other words. Or we start to use two words, a phrase, as it’s own word. This would be formalized into this new language with vocal and written markers to insert in between individual words that when spliced together form a good word for some new thing. This might act both as a staging tool for new concepts before they are formally introduced into the dictionary but also a better way of improvising combinations on the spot to meet strange or funny one-off combinations.
Unlike thai and a few other languages, written words have delimiters (!) and unlike English, it isn’t an empty space that can easily be interpreted incorrectly.
The alphabet would consist of very carefully designed letters, each one representing one of the aforementioned base sounds. Each letter would be designed so as to be very difficult to write or read in a way that causes it to be mistaken for another letter. In English we cross our zeros to not confuse them with The letter O. This language would effectively do that in advance for all letters.
Still haven’t thought of what conjugation method would be best. Or other higher level stuff.
There are tons of ways to describe the sounds that a human mouth can make, and you can find very detailed nomenclature about it but generally it is useful to think of a spoken language as consisting of a set of phonemes, which are fundamental sounds. I looked at a list of the most common phonemes and just decided to use the top 20 in order to make the pronunciation and recognition of all the sounds of this new language as easy as possible. Between all the languages of the world, there is considerably more overlap of some sounds than others, so I believe it’s useful to use the most overlapped ones.
Most languages consist of open phonemes and closed phonemes. Most languages include words that end on a closed sound like the word “stop.” Notice that actually saying this word without making an open sound and the closed “p” sound is impossible. In reality the word sounds like “stop-ah” because of the physics of the mouth. In this new language, all words start with a closed sound and end with an open sound, for example “gah” “dah” “dee” “nee” and so on.
If you take a bunch of common closed sounds and open sounds, and have none that sound similar to the others in any way (distinctive sounds are necessary for easy learning and understanding by learners because after a certain age, discriminating between similar sounding sounds is impossible.) then you have a list that can create around 40 or 400 “base combinations” of one closed sound and one open sound, like the examples above. I can’t remeber the exact number but I have it all written out somewhere. Limiting words to 20 or 30 combinations of these base combinations, you have a word space that is larger than a human can memorize probably, even after cutting out all the bad combinations like “dee-dee-dee-dee-dee.” So in the end you have words that might look like “nah-kah-too-nigh.” You give up compactness compared to English but gain advantages in other areas. Namely clarity and truer correlation between how a word is spelled and pronounced which is key for learning a new language. Also it’s impossible to have something like two words that sound the same like “two” and “too.”
The language would cross of several base combinations as I mentioned earlier. These singletons “dee” “dah” “nee” and so on, would not have any meaning. The next level up, two of these combinations together like “dee-nee” or “too-goo” would have meanings that are fundamental and common and would act as root words to form other higher level words just like in English with Latin and Greek. So for example the root word “dee-soo” means to finish, to terminate, to end. There is a joke in there by the way. And the root word “vigh-tah” might mean life, animation or prosperity. So the word “dee-soo-vigh-tah” might mean death. And so on. I think the root word system is very good in English and doing it very deliberately in a new language would be good.
Often in English we make up words with other words. Or we start to use two words, a phrase, as it’s own word. This would be formalized into this new language with vocal and written markers to insert in between individual words that when spliced together form a good word for some new thing. This might act both as a staging tool for new concepts before they are formally introduced into the dictionary but also a better way of improvising combinations on the spot to meet strange or funny one-off combinations.
Unlike thai and a few other languages, written words have delimiters (!) and unlike English, it isn’t an empty space that can easily be interpreted incorrectly.
The alphabet would consist of very carefully designed letters, each one representing one of the aforementioned base sounds. Each letter would be designed so as to be very difficult to write or read in a way that causes it to be mistaken for another letter. In English we cross our zeros to not confuse them with The letter O. This language would effectively do that in advance for all letters.
Still haven’t thought of what conjugation method would be best. Or other higher level stuff.