What would the great inventors Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison think of what their humble inventions have ultimately lead to?
I think there's a huge problem in all this that the majority of us seem content to ignore: we are upgrading our communication technology, but we are NOT upgrading our communication.
Languages have largely been left to slowly evolve much like the slow process of the evolution of life on Earth.
Making English phonetic is, however, not the answer. Let's looks at some examples why:
to, two and too all sound exactly the same.
wear and the modern pronunciation of where sound the same.
Their, and there sound exactly the same.
There are so many words in English that sound exactly the same, but mean completely different things. These words are only differentiated by their spelling and context. In many cases if the spelling were the same it would be terribly confusing.
Let's just look at the English language. It's spelling is atrocious. It has very little semblance to a phonetic language. If English were phonetic it would cause absolutely no harm, and we could successfully get rid of an entire subject in elementary school without batting an eye. Literacy rates would also improve as reading would be way easier to learn.
English also has extremely complicated grammar.
For example the word 'to be' is conjugated into the following forms: be, is, am, are, were, was, will be, etc. Yet these words hardly even resemble one another. Why is conjugating verbs even necessary? It's a ridiculous theme that happens in so many languages. Just add a pronoun to a verb and you're good: I be, he be, she be, they be. It all means the same thing why the hell do we have is, am, etc?
Also, in English class the importance of nouns and verbs is constantly drilled into our heads, but really we don't even need separate words for noun and verb forms. In fact English occasionally does this. Examples: a gift, to gift, a fish, to fish, etc. Why not just make it so every word has a noun and verb form if it makes sense to have one and you can tell which it is through context.
How is it that humans seem so content to stick with a language as corrupt as English? Believe me French isn't any better.... Pretty much all natural human languages I've seen have so much illogical nonsense built into them.
So why are we focused on making computers and programming languages better, but we really don't seem to give a damn about improving our spoken languages?
Well, that's not true for everyone. There is a community of people out there inventing new languages in an attempt to solve some of the world's linguistic challenges.
I've watched pretty much every episode of Conlang Critic on Youtube. I really recommend it to anyone who is interested in languages.
A Conlang is a constructed language: one that's artificially created.
Some people make languages for TV shows like Klingon, or that language the blue people in Avatar speak. Some people do it for their sci-fi or fantasy stories or video games, like all the languages in the game Skyrim.
Anyway, I've seen a lot of conlangs out there and my all time favorite one is Toki Pona because it's an incredibly simple and easy to learn language. Toki Pona only has a couple hundred words and it sounds pretty cool, but it's still lacking the most important feature I believe a language should have: logical phonetic construction. Words should sound like what they mean: I mean sounds should have meaning.
I learned Python 3 in a week. It took me over 9 months to learn conversational Italian while studying it every day and speaking it regularly. Why is it that computer languages are way faster to learn than spoken languages? Maybe the answer is simple: they are logical and they don't have abstract and stupid rules and hundreds of words that mean the same things. Really why should any language have more than one word that means the exact same thing? It doesn't make communication more effective, it's just more confusing.
So, over the last 22 years I've been working on a conlang called Kawthi.
I didn't want to create a language by mashing together existing languages: most conlangs are like that, but I did want to make a language based off of what fundamentally makes us human.
I spent a lot of time studying animal communication. I found it interesting how primates primarily communicate to get their needs met (whether your teach them sign language or they are communicating through their native methods). I realized that humans aren't much different, except we have an enhanced ability to visualize the needs of others as if they were our own due to our more developed memory (this is empathy). So, humans communicate to meet their needs and their perceived needs of others.
So, I reasoned if communication is rooted in meeting primal needs then language aught to fundamentally be based off of primal needs, feelings, urges and concepts central to communicating our needs.
Kawthi is a dynamic language where words are built from 42 root phonemes. Each of these phonemes has a unique meaning based off of a primal human need or concept.
In my studies I've come to realize how important mimicry is in the animal kingdom not only is survival, but also in communication. I reasoned that early humans probably started making sounds to mimic the ones they heard around them as well as making sounds that communicated feeling like other animals do. Examples: growling, howling, snarling, whimpering, etc. So, I reasoned that sounds should mimic a sound related to their meaning when possible.
I spend considerable time studying all the different alphabets and writing systems of the world and I found that for the most part the symbols that once had meaning or were related to something with meaning have largely lost their meaning. However, I found a common theme: characters are usually based off of simplified pictures that somehow either relate to the meaning of the image or to words which contained the sounds the letters represent.
I found Hebrew particularly interesting because of the rich meaning associated with each of the characters. Though, the meaning of the words doesn't seem to correlate well with these, at least not in a universal sense.
I spent a lot of time developing different character sets for Kawthi. I started out by creating a phonetic alphabet that showed a simplified diagram of how one makes the sounds using their vocal tract. The alphabet looked really cool, but unfortunately it was super difficult to learn and once I learnt it then it was crazy hard to remember what the sounds actually meant.
I decided to take a hint from human history and base the characters off of their meaning, not off of how the sounds are made. Kawthi characters are a simplified depiction primitive concepts related directly to their meanings. I memorized the new character set and the meaning of each sound in less than 10 minutes after making this change.
Kawthi theoretically should be quite easy to learn once you memorize the meaning
So, I'm going to prepare some youtube videos teaching those who are interested how to speak Kawthi, but in the meantime I thought I'd put a link to the guide I'm working on that explains it thus far just in case I die tomorrow or something. I'd hate for it to be lost forever.
Also, just so you know Kawthi actually sounds pretty cool. It does not sound like speaking a computer language despite the fact it is logical: remember it is based off of our humanity.
I also made a dictionary program in Python that allows you to enter new words and look up existing ones. So far I have about 430 words entered in.
Guide to the Kawthi Language
Kawthi Dictionary (Requires Python 3 and the tkinter library)
Kawthi Font
My hope is to make Kawthi an open language that a community of people will help me develop to the point it grows to become a powerful, precise global language.
So, please feel free to leave me any feedback you have.
Hopefully, I won't die tomorrow and I'll be able to make my youtube instructional videos.
