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Peanut butter compound

Today I will be talking about compound words and how they are formed with eidea.
Let’s recall: meta-eidea are just a definition to call a group of very similar eidea among people the same. In addition you may have seen me writing about an interlinked group of meta-eidea. This can mean they copy compound words, but this does not have to be the case necessarily.

Let me make this more concrete with an example.

Source: Wikipedia

[cart]

 

For most people this will be a single eidos and it will look something like the image I used. For some people its will take more and could form something like: [two][wheel][transport][vehicle]

I could also give you an example which shows the opposite.

Source: Wikipedia

[peanut butter]

 

Noticed me not writing [peanut][butter]? For some people it might really be something like [peanut][paste], but for most people it is in fact one single eidos.

Ok, but how do you tell when something is a single eidos, or a group of eidea? Well, you can not really tell, because it differs among people(1). That’s where meta-eidea roughly come in.

I will predict where to put the boundaries. Sometimes you will see me write a compound word as a single meta-eidos, sometimes you will see me write one word as a group of meta-eidea; English does not always follow what really happens in my mind but then again it might work different in your own mind too.
This also is makes making languages such a difficult task, It has to work for everybody, or at least give them enough pointers to reproduce the intended meaning.

There are a few cases where the break is very obvious. Witness this example.

Note: From now on I will group meta-eidea with a distinct role (objects) with round brackets.

(Pete and John) threw (me) (a yellow ball).

Adjectives
First notice [yellow][ball]. Yellow is an adjective, and in almost every case an adjective is a separate eidos. Exceptions are: ‘fast ball’, big bang, often derived adjectives.

Conjunction
(Pete and John) is one object but it may be very obvious Pete but also John are separate eidea. Also for conjunctions we can say for almost every case it is made up out of separate eidea. There are on the other hand a few obvious exceptions: ‘lean and mean’, ‘bed and breakfast’, something you can see as one thing.

Before closing I’d like to state a final thing. Foregoing I spoke about ‘interlinked eidea’, by this I mean that A links to B but B also links to A. In fact, there are different ways eidea can be linked and this makes room for precedence.
For instance:  

      apple pie                versus                   pie apple
(a pie filled with apples)                                    (an apple designated for use in pie)

In English sequence tells us the precedence, but when you want to draw this on paper you need to know how it is linked. I will tell you more on this subject in a later stadium.

That will be all for today. 'Next week' I will be discussing one of my most ockward theories, it will be mind bobbeling but very enlighting I dare to say.

Have a nice day!

Ferry Timmers

 

Footnotes:

(1) I once ran an experiment where people could choose from a single word or a compound when seeing various pictures. The results varied, even among people who speak the same language.

Interim

As you might know by know I have a bit of a creative definition of the phrase ‘next week’ Well this is not likely to alter so apologies on for hand for this. Last time I updated has been ages ago so let me regroup everything into this special interim article.

Language (my definition) is a way to decipher code in a way it can be understood by different receivers.

To start off, the goal of this blog is to let me show the world my theories, what I think what languages makes tick, and the development of my very own language: O-lingua.
With O-linuga I try to make a language using concepts that are new to everybody. It is all based on my theory of eidea.

Note: singular: eidos, plural: eidea.

Eidea are what I like to call the codes of thought. They are little pieces of information that float in our mind. I like to make it a bit more specific by only calling a code we can put our finger on an eidos. Still it is e very broad definition. Eidea can be about: a thing, a feeling, a memory, a figment of imagination, and a definition, something very concrete, something abstract. I could go on like this for a while, but I hope you get the picture.
Because eidea can have so many forms, they are also very personal. And therefore I define meta-eidea.

Meta-eidos is an eidos that not really exists, but made to be able to speak generally about eidea. An eidos itself is personally, but we may notice from person to person eidea that are very similar, or have a similar meaning. Then we can make a prototype of these eidea, and give it a name that everybody understands. The easiest meta-eidea to call are concrete things like [chair], [table] or [spoon]. But still, did I mean a diner table, or a coffee table? What color?
It is practically impossible to make a meta-eidos that works for everybody, keep that in mind.

Note: From now on I will use square brackets to indicate meta-eidea.

Context. When I speak about context than I mean the environment in with eidea are being build or parsed. You could easily describe it as ‘the state of mind’ that exist at the moment a person is practicing language. Because there are infinite parameters to a context, I will not try to map it. It is only important to state it has a large effect on how language or eidea are formed. Furthermore I’d like to state that chaos theory applies on context.

Object is a definition used to be even more general about eidea. An object can either be a meta-eidos or a group of meta-eidea interlinked. I like to use it when the exact definition of the eidos does not really matter for my example.

Roles. When reading or forming a sentence you will have a number of objects, and an action. You need to know what the relation of a specific object to the action is in order to know where the sentence is about. This relation I call a role (the role of an object).

Particles (my definition) are small eidea that tell something about other eidea or the relation between eidea. I also tend to call them semi-eidea, because they have single not really a definition. Particles are used very often to specify a role, and it might actually provide a link between objects.

Links are relations between eidea. The link can be strong, weak or something in between. I will discuss the effect of this in a future article.

The buffer is the area of the mind where eidea are stored. Eidea need to be stored temporarily before they can be deciphered and the meaning of a sentence or subsequent a story can be understood. The role of an object actually influences at what position in the buffer it will be stored. This helps to understand a sentence more quickly. Different languages have different buffer usage; that is why I distinguish 3 dimensions:
Buffer width: the number of distinguishable roles a specified language uses.
Buffer height: the average size or complexity of the objects a specified language has.
Buffer depth: the number of objects that a specified language can hold at a time.

Note: The buffer is an element of context.

To return to my definition of language and to include the eidea theory I’d like to state: What a language is and O-lingua has to be is a way to decipher eidea so that different receivers still get (more or less) the same message. In addition for O-lingua I want it to be as easy and unambiguous as possible for a sender to decipher the eidea (s)he wants to transmit.

I will introduce a few more shocking theories ‘next week’.
Have a nice day!
Ferry Timmers

The buffer

Last time I told something about particles, small sometimes hidden identifiers in communication that links words together by defining the role of a word. Next to the fact they connect words, they also help compiling the sentence into eidos so it can be understood by the recipient. Before I am going to tell about this, you might recall a little puzzle I gave you last time. Here are the answers:

1. Time
2. Location
3. Subject
4. Possessor
5. Direct object
6. Indirect object

The term indirect object is a bit vague; a broad spectrum of roles can be called indirect to the action. That is why in the future I will divide it into a bunch of other roles. Also in the future in order to speak more general about parts of a sentence I like to call a meta-eidos or a group of meta-eidos an object.
For instance the sentence:

Pete threw a purple-blue striped ball with little yellow dots that John got from his uncle recently trough a window.

This is quite a long sentence but it only has three objects. The thing that was thrown trough the window was described very extensive, it remains one object. Sometimes it is hard to see what words belong to one object; in this case wonder what the role of the object is, in relation to the action. In this case the purple-blue blablabla ball is a direct object. It is very important to see an object and its role as two separate things.

A purple-blue striped ball with little yellow dots that John got from his uncle recently threw Pete trough a window.

See what I mean ;)

How can half a sentence be one object, without our minds going haywire? Well, because we do not read it all at once. We are capable of determinating the objects in a sentence and it roles. Before decrypting the actual meaning of the sentence we will put all these facts in our mind, in a space I will refer to as ‘The buffer’. How things are arranged into the buffer depends on the language. Each role has a specific position in the buffer. You can see the buffer as a large pit in which we throw the eidos. It will stay in the buffer for some time, until we forget(1) about it. How long also depends on the language: For instance in Japanese it is possible to write a story while mentioning the main character only once!

I will define three dimensions in which a specific language will use the buffer. Multiplied it should be the same more or less.

Buffer width: the number of different roles a specified language uses.
Buffer height: the average size of the objects a specified language has.
Buffer depth: the number of objects that a specified language can hold at a time.

When you check this for a bunch of different languages mainly from different families, you’ll notice it differs form each other. When creating you own language—like I’m planning—it is good to know this; it is important to find the right balance, or else you might get buffer overflows ;)

Buffer

Ok, it’s a wrap for today. Next week I’ll be back with an interim. Now and then an interim will appear to sum up progress and summarize and state important definitions, so don’t expect anything new.

Have a nice day!
Ferry Timmers

Footnotes:

(1) We will actually not forget it, but it will reside to a long-term buffer.

Particles

The last time I told something about grammatical cases and how they help defining the role of a word. Next to cases also the word order or certain habits help defining the role words. But sometimes this is not enough, and we need special identifiers to mark a certain role. First of all we’re going to look deeper into what roles really are.

When you look at a sentence you will realize there are very concrete elements, and a bit more abstract ones. The concrete elements we can most times easily mark meta-eidos. If you where asked to draw the sentence on a piece of paper, you could start with these words as groups of orbs spread across the paper. You could group nouns with adjectives, and verbs with adverbs, but I’ll come to that in later articles. Now if you give this piece of paper to somebody else, he could not reconstruct your sentence, because he does not know how to connect the words. This is exactly what is missing: links!
Ok, let’s pick our magic marker and start drawing lines. We start at the action of the sentence, because we will see this actually links all together. When you draw lines to the different elements of the sentence you will notice two things: first, the groups are exactly the same as the groups we discussed with cases; second, you could not tell from the words it self which role the linked group of orbs has.
Well, so there must be something in our mind that tells us something about a link, or more precisely: the role the linked group has. This indicator will not always be present in text, but will be in our minds. These indicators I will call particles (1). In my definition of particles I will also call prepositions particles, since prepositions tell us something about the role of words. If I had to draw particles, after having drawn the links I would put little orbs in the middle of the lines.

Finally, just to bubble your mind: the particles actually are the links!
So now you know the main principal of my theory, I will call it the (meta-eidos)—(particle)—(meta-eidos) model. Or lets for now just refer to it as being linked orbs.

An example:

Particles

 

OK, a little puzzle for you, I left out the role descriptions. Next time I tell you which roles belong to the numbers.

Now you know what particles are. In the next update I will tell you about another use of particles other then indicating the role of words. It is important to see particles as little eidos that structure larger groups of eidos being the cement between the bricks. A pile of loose bricks can be real impressive, but it won’t keep you dry. ;)

Have a nice day!
Ferry Timmers

 

Footnotes:

(1) Linguists usually refer to particles as being words that will no be changed by the rest of the sentence. I added a bit more to that definition by also calling (hidden) identifiers particles.

Breaking down the sentence (Part II)

Part II

When reading a sentence, next to words you also read structure. The structure can be expressed by sequence or punctuation marks, but there is also something called ‘roles’. This simply gives a word a role. With other words: it tells how the word relates to the action described by the verb. Very often the roles are not identified, so you have to use context or habit to detect them. When roles do are identified, we speak of grammatical cases. There are an infinite number of different roles, and quite a lot of defined cases, though in English and a lot of other language four cases seem to be enough. Still we can access the infinite number of roles needed with these languages; this because roles are distributed over the cases; and the rest is defined with prepositions and word order.

For completion’s sake I will treat the four cases as present in English.

Nominative
This is the subject in the sentence. The action described by the verb will directly correlate with this word. The object is usually also the instigator of the action.

“Pete threw the ball.”

Accusative
This is the direct object in the sentence. The action described by the verb will be subjected upon this object.

“He tripped Pete.”

Genitive
This indicates a possessor. Other words linked to a genitive are identified as a possession.

“Pete’s ball”

Dative
This is the indirect object in the sentence. The action described by the verb will be pointed toward this object in most situations.

“He gave it to Pete.”

Dative is also a garbage collector for all roles not described by the other cases: for instance a word which accompanies the subject.

“She went with Pete.”

Ok, now, where are de identifications? Yes I know, modern English has dropped the whole lot of conjugations.  Old English had for each noun and adjective a series of conjugations to indicate its case. Now all we have to separate the subject from the direct object is word order.

“Dave tripped Pete” means something complete different then “Pete tripped Dave”
Ah! But we still have a conjugation to indicate a possessor: < ‘s >

All cases not treated are indicated by the preposition and thus are called indirect objects.

Now I’ve told you about cases. This is also the last thing I will tell about them. O-lingu does not need cases, but in order to explain how O-lingu expresses roles I need to explain cases and more important: how cases evolved.  But I’ll save that for the next time.

Have a nice day!
Ferry Timmers

Breaking down the sentence (Part I)

 

Part I
Before I’m going to tell you about my language – O-lingu – I first need to clear out the structure of language further. In my last article I told about the existence of commandlets that make up thoughts called eidos. I now need to refine this theory a little bit more in order to explain the inner working of O-lingu.

If you look at a sentence you see a couple of words, but the information provided is always bigger then just a bunch of words. We always add context, even is it is a sentence completely on its own. In that case we invent a context, using things that are currently in our mind. This in fact is exactly what context is: the things that are currently in our mind. When you read a novel, you gradually fill your head with information. A sentence at one point provides information in the form of words, but then the context of all previously read sentences, and the images in your mind add to it. It is at this point the words converted into eidos meet the rest, and at this point you grasp the meaning of sentence. Ok, I admit, this was very vague, let’s try to make it more concrete:
First of all, the process of converting words into eidos is not absolute; last time I told it is very much different from person to person, but also for a single person it differs every time. The amount of things that have influence on this process is immensely big. Location, time, people around you, ambience, even a scent you barely smell could have huge impact. This is best described by the chaos theory, one could not predict it.
Secondly, a word could carry more information than its definition. This means that somehow also the sequence of word matter, or there seems to be little identifiers at work. The latter case is what I want to discuss today.

Because words are constantly interpreted differently by your mind, a way is needed to make sure the conception is as unambiguous as possible. With other words, to make sure the receiver gets the same meaning as the sender. One of the things we can be pretty sure the receiver gets them right are meta-eidos. Most commonly they are nouns: A chair for instance. Every body knows what a chair is, it has in its most recognizable form four legs and a back, its purpose is to sit on. When I said Chair you probably already had an image of one in your mind, it will not be the same as mine, but it will be the same idea. In a way it will link all things you ever called ‘chair’ together in one theme, and this will pop into your head the second you read “chair” thus introducing context: a meta-eidos.

Now I have ensured there are word we can use without worrying the receiving party will get them wrong, it is time to find a way to use them in a sentence. Simply putting the words next to each other could do the trick, but makes it a very context sensitive language: A sentence could be read in various ways and it is matter for the receiver to find the right one. There are languages – like Chinese – which thrive on this, but a lot of languages – including English – provide a little bit of help.

Tomorrow part II
Have a nice day!
Ferry Timmers

Introduction

Let me introduce myself:
I’m Ferry and born and still living in the Netherlands. I’m a first year Computer engineering student and I’m interested in linguistics and philosophy. In this blog I will discuss languages in general or I will tell you about ‘O-lingu’, the con-language I’m working on.

Why would a computer engineer be interested in human languages? Computer languages and human languages have more in common then one may think. I don’t know what the official definition of ‘language’ is but for me it means: “A way to decipher code so it can be understood by separate receivers.” The definition of ‘code’ for computer systems means commandlets a processor needs to execute. There are different types of processors with different placed commandlets. In order to make a computer program that will works with each of these processors a language is needed. A language needs to be compiled back into code for each of these processors separately.

A language makes it possible for completely different kind of computers to communicate with each other, called a protocol. Languages make it possible for humans and computer systems to interact. A language makes it possible for a completely different kind of people to communicate with each other, called a human language. Yes I know, it is a bit corny, but important to state.

Processor commandlets are stated in operation code, and languages can describe them singularly, but at most time a whole group of operation codes are described with a single word. This is exactly the same with human languages. A single word can describe very complex things, without actually loosing its complexity. We still know what codes were meant. Did I just say code!? Yes! I did!
Languages describe code, Human languages describe human code. What the hell is human code?? Well, every thing we think is all about human code. We can’t actually put our finger on it, or maybe if we try really hard, but when you come to think of it, every thing what we think exists out of commandlets; at least, that is my theory. I will call them emotions, but it’s not only about what we feel, but also about what we see, hear, smell, what we know and imagine. A commandlet we do can put our finger on I will call an eidos (1). Eidos can be personal, describe a thing only known to one person, or be so general there is a language which has a word for it. In the latter case I will speak of a meta-eidos.

Because the human codes are very different from one person to another, you actually need a language to communicate. Since I was a child, I was fascinated by language, and I wanted to know what makes them work, and how they evolved. About the latter one I’ve gotten to know a lot because my good friend Marijn, a comparative linguist. If you’re into languages, you should basically check his blog.
Looking at all the different languages that exist today or their precedents that have existed, I started to believe there is a system to all of them, and this system, although it may seem otherwise, is logical. My goal is to resolve this system in terms of logic. To help me with this, I started construction my own language: O-lingu.

I’m happy to have you, and your comments are very welcome. Most of the things on this blog are my own theories. You are free to use them, but don’t forget to include where you have got them.

Have a nice day!
Ferry Timmers

P.S. I try to update my blog every Sunday, but I can’t promise anything. :(

 

Footnotes:

(1) The term eidos was coined by Plato and is Greek for ‘Idea’, before I used the term Emotic. You might notice I still call it accidentally Emotic sometime.