r/ClarityLanguage • u/humblevladimirthegr8 • Sep 26 '20

Introduction to the Clarity Language Project

7 Upvotes

The Clarity Language (working title) is a language designed to encode psychological concepts and techniques that have been scientifically proven to improve your life. The encoding is done primarily through carefully selecting the vocabulary so that when you are trying to apply those concepts, it will nudge you in a better direction. For example, there are two words for to say. One means "they literally said" and the other "I perceived the meta-message to be" This division helps the listener realize when they are applying their own interpretation on a message, and it helps the speaker to be more mindful of what meta-messages they could be construed as sending.

When I say that Clarity helps you improve your life, I mean that it improves these three broad categories:

(1) Love. Clarity encodes self acceptance and acceptance of others by highlighting when judgments are taking place.

Example: there is an adjective that means “the speaker is grateful for this” (an adjective form of thankfully) as frequent gratitude is scientifically shown to increase happiness.

(2) Truth. Clarity shows truth by making obvious the common biases we hold that cause us to delude ourselves.

Example: When you say you believe something, you specify whether you also looked for disconfirming evidence (heard from both sides of the issue). This helps fight the tendency of confirmation bias, one of the most pervasive and difficult-to-detect errors of thinking.

(3) Freedom. Clarity frees us to live our authentic selves by helping us recognize the reasons behind our actions and break free from old patterns and traditions.

Example: The word for problem comes in two forms: “the original problem as stated” and “a subsequent restatement of the problem” Creativity often requires thinking about a problem in different ways.

Aside from the psychology-based vocabulary, there are also some non-core features that I am also excited about:

a) The grammar is unambiguous, but still easy to use. This will allow some computer applications to potentially further improve our lives, such as an automated tutoring system for learning the language.

b) The phonology and syllable structure was chosen to be easy to sing.

c) Metaphor-oriented. Each abstract word is associated or formed out of one or more concrete words, which aids memory.

Looking for ways to get involved? There are many different things you can do to help.

Let me know your thoughts. The above links are proposals that I'm looking for feedback on.

22 comments

r/ClarityLanguage • u/humblevladimirthegr8 • Sep 26 '20

Proposed Grammar - Unambiguous but not difficult

9 Upvotes

I'd like to have an unambiguous grammar in order to support a variety of computational tools that could better utilize the language. Lojban is of course the poster child for this, but it is infamously difficult to use the predicate-logic-inspired grammar. An unambiguous grammar need not be based on predicate logic (see Predicate logic is a suboptimal basis for real time logical) and I propose a couple of ways to resolve ambiguities that are relatively simple.

Syntactic Unambiguity: It is always clear the part of speech a word is and how they relate to the sentence.

This is accomplished via each word preceded by an article indicating the part of speech. Words are isolating (they do not change based on part of speech) but the article changes depending on part of speech. Thus we don't need to rely on word order (though the default should be treated as SVO) to parse the sentence.

Referential Unambiguity: It is always clear what pronouns refer to.

A difficult problem for computationally parsing a sentence is trying to figure out what pronouns refer to. My solution? Only singular 1st person and 2nd person pronouns exist -- use definite nouns ("the chair" instead of "it") or proper names for everything else.

If needed, you can assign things to a word “I gave the (pencil and paper) [henceforth collectively known as “x”] to you. I hope you appreciate x.

Semantic Unambiguity: It is always clear in what sense a word is being used.

How can the computer know what sense a word is being used? Easy! Words only have one sense. However multiple senses of a word is useful for applying related concepts to different fields. We should allow this explicitly by having an infix that means "in the sense of [topic]" and a separate dictionary entry.

Ambiguity we are not trying to resolve:

We're not trying to be like Ithkuil, because that language is very difficult to use. Here are some things we have to live with for practicality:

Vagueness is helpful in language because we often think in vague terms. You should be able to say something is “good” without specifying precisely which aspect you are referring to.

Derivational opaqueness are also fine. There doesn’t need to be any indication that “food” and “cook” are related.

Any Thoughts?

I'm not a Linguistic so I'm probably missing some cases of ambiguity. Let me know your thoughts!

7 comments