Serendipity Daily Thoughts

Welcome back to another post. I wrote about alphabets in the last post. As we know, it is the most employed language around the world – around 70% of population uses it in their lives. We also know that English has evolved through social interactions. However, there are some languages that has been invented by human beings, such as Esperanto. In today’s post, I would like to write about these newly developed languages. Actually, these languages are called constructed languages, or conlangs, to distinguish with naturally evolved languages.

It is understood that there are four types of artificial languages around the world currently. The first type is the auxiliary languages, where humans try to make language easier to interpret and learn. Esperanto, created in the late 19th centuries, is one of the most famous language of this kind, with the speakers reach around 2 million people in the world. They often have less complicated grammar and similar letters as alphabets. Some of my kind readers may have already studied this language and found out that it is very intuitive.

Another type is the fictional language, where people inhibit language within a novel or a movie. One of examples is the Elvish in Lord of the Ring. Although this type of language may not be used worldwide, a language developed by the artist can be used by readers and audience to interpret their work, potentially enriching the experience consumers obtain from it. It is even possible for us to create a new language and write a novel using it. In this way, your work definitely stand out from others.

The third type of language is the engineered language, which scientists developed to make things easier to understand. Logics used in philosophy and mathematics is one example. The concept of logic is to be able to express language sentences with more simple signs, so letters employed in the system are totally different from alphabets. (If you remember what “cap” and “cup” in mathematics are, you would probably understand.) Another interesting example is Toki Pona, where speakers are forced to use only over 100 words to express everything. Words that have similar meanings can be expressed as the same word, so it would be up to readers to consider what the represented word is actually meant by the writer. I personally feel that inability of manipulating various terms makes writing works boring, but I also think that I would like to try having conversation using such a language. It must be fun to guess hidden feelings behind one word utilizing the context of the sentence.

The last type of language is coding and emergent language. It is a tool to elaborate the communication between humans and machines, enabling machines to do their work as humans wish. Almost all of the applications run by humans have been created by written programming languages. There are several types of coding languages, but most of them require programmers to use alphabets to create prompts. Emergent language is actually a completely new and different type of language than coding. As we have explored, the constructed languages were developed for more fluent communication among humans or between humans and machines. However, the emergent language does not involve human intervention. It is rather developed and employed among AI. When AI agents cooperate to complete tasks, they may create a new language with a new set of letters so as for shortening communications. It is nowadays possible that AIs talk to each other using languages that human being cannot comprehend immediately.

Over the last three posts, I wrote about language, and I tried to deliver a message that language is also one of the most significant developments made in human history. I may write another post related to language or completely new topic in the next post, so please stay tuned until the next post!

Thank you for reading my post till the end. Please feel free to leave any comments, including whether you have learnt any conlangs or you want to learn new one.

See you!