Language
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Background: The part of speech known as the “verb”: not strictly necessary! A language without the verb: still technically functional! English vocabulary: already quite large (perhaps excessively large). And obviously fewer words: easier language. Proposal: So for the sake of both children and foreign language students of English, an obvious plan: verbless English! Some examples:…
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Background: In some languages, there are several variants of words (like “this” or “that”) that give you additional “implicit” information about the world. For example, if a person says “this notebook,” it indicates a notebook that is near them. If they say “that notebook,” it indicates a more distantly-located notebook. Even though a language can…
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Background: It’s time-consuming to learn a language. It’s also generally advantageous for a language to have as many speakers as possible, since more speakers means more chance of being able to use a language in a given situation. (In the extreme case, a “secret” language that only one person knew would have very minimal utility.)…
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Background: In English, there are names for days of the week (Monday, Tuesday, …) and months (January, February, …). The Issue: But it is not actually necessary for weekdays and months to be named—it’s just a bunch of extra words that serve no purpose! Many other languages (e.g. Chinese) manage with days named “Day #1,…
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The issue: Many computers are unable to handle letters that don’t fall into the set of Latin characters used by English. Even though the Unicode standard has greatly improved multi-character-set accessibility, problems still arise: A character might not exist in a chosen font. For example, “Egyptian Hieroglyph of a bird catching a fish” is probably…
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Background: Our current alphabet is derived from an ancient system of representational icons. These icons were once pictures of actual objects, but have been simplified to an easier-to-write form over the millennia. For example, according to the inerrant source of knowledge known as Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet): The letter “Q” used to be one of these: This…
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The issue: Sometimes, you don’t like a programming language (like Perl or Python), or a natural language (like English or Spanish). You might have your reasons, or maybe not—maybe you just want to destroy it completely for no reason at all! Proposal: Here’s a simple way to go about wreaking destruction on the language…
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