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Let's create the language of the internet

3 points by sherancoera ↗ HN
One of the biggest challenges we face today is that we all speak different languages and learning a new language is pretty hard (at least for most of us).

It’s also hard to translate existing languages accurately, because of the many different ways in which languages are structured.

My goal is to create a beautiful language that people inherently understand, is easy to convey and can be expressed easily. Rather than using a new form of letters and words, I thought of creating an alphabet of expressions based on something like “Emojis”.

Each expression can be tagged to words or word groups, and jointly these can express how we think and feel. We can all understand it and express it though our smartphones.

What do you think?

5 comments

[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 27.4 ms ] thread
BlueKitt
Thats just amazing idea that i never thaught of. But someone has to create it and start using it.I think characters would be better than emojis, because everyone has letters available and almost every smart system uses different emojis. But really cool idea
ColinWright
You have a number of problems ...

There is a short story by Orson Scott Card called "Unaccompanied Sonata". You can read the wikipedia plot summary[0], but in it a composer is prohibited from listening to other music so as to ensure that his ideas are pure, original, and non-derivative.

And that's well and good, but science and art both progress by pushing existing work further. It's all well and good to try to create things from scratch, but often that simply means making the same mistakes over and over, failing to learn from the experience of others, and getting no further simply because you run out of time and/or enthusiasm.

So there is value in going for this with a brand spanking new approach, fresh and unencumbered by previous work. But you are running the risk of re-inventing the wheel.

On the other hand you could look at existing attempts to create a single language for the world. It's been attempted before, and if you haven't heard of them it's a measure of just how successful they were. Or in this case, weren't.

So by all means go for it and see what you can achieve. But if you decide to see what other people have tried, here are a few links:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=sapir+worf

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=universal+constructed+lang...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unaccompanied_Sonata

yesenadam
8|
yesenadam
More helpful responses:

1. This sounds like a great idea: In trying to do it, you will learn a lot about all the ways it won't work. (It seems to me.) I started writing a program once to understand poetry & jokes. I learned a lot, like just how much humans have to know to understand this stuff. You have to know about everything just to understand one word! Best example I know of this: see the chapter on 'over' in Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things.

2. It sounds a bit like - music! Maybe you could use music for that? Hmm well no. But maybe look at Deryck Cooke's The Language of Music, which is a remarkable attempt to spell out explicitly what the elements/motifs/phrases/melodic units in music are saying. I guess any partially-facial-expression-based language would have a lot in common with that.