My idea for a nonlinear conlang

[@LitteralyaTree]

I love seeing videos like this one where the person talking about their craft is so deeply passionate about it and the only reason the video exists is to show that passion. It reminds me why I love humans.

[@uluscri]

omg thank you! that's exactly the kind of thing I most wanna see in the world, and I'm glad I was able to make something that for others :) humans are awesome

[@nathanieldevris9452]

I imagine what could make such a language so cool is that reading it would involve first taking a global look at the entire sentence then zooming in to each of the individual words with all of their markers. It’s really cool cuz that kind of starting global and moving in feels very unique in languages. I imagine it’d be an interesting way to draw out the emotions of a text. Like, laying out the tone of a sentence so the reader has that information from the outset, which is then informed by what they go on to read and all the markers with it

[@uluscri]

yes, this exactly! I want a reader to have to explore works written in this language. make reading an adventure :0. and it gives the one writing so much room to put in artistic flair

[@evildinobot]

Great insights! Just a suggestion: a character set usually has a theme-ish specific stylistic appearance, where one can at a glance identify a multiple characters to be in the same language, even if they don't understand it at all. e.g. korean, simplified/trad. chinese, japanese (hiragana, katakana and kanji/chinese-ish characters)

[@uluscri]

Yeah, I'm trying to make my symbols have a distinct look unique to my style, but the emphasis is on making their meanings easily understandable. it's a balance

[@chosoistryinghisbest]

just saw this recommended and this looks cool asf (btw the audio is great so dont worry !!)

[@uluscri]

thank you!

[@anotparticularlynotableguy]

As a linguist, this concept is fascinating and has inspired me a lot!

[@uluscri]

aw hell yeah! if i can inspire actual linguists (i'm not a linguist), then that's a win in my book

[@Milark]

Got this in my recommended randomly, cool stuff! Just 300 views right niw

[@uluscri]

Thank you!

[@the_wumbologist]

this is awesome! you’ve inspired me to try my hand at one of these

[@uluscri]

fuck yeah!

[@stephenwaldron2748]

toki! I think, for me, I would have it such that descriptors connect to the noun their describing. I'd also see verbs, as well as prepositions, as special kinds of descriptor: In many languages, including the local dialect where I'm from, verbs and adjectives behave very similarly grammatically. I like to think of them as states, with there being a sense of tense and aspect clarifying the way they're modifying the noun. For example, we say, "she eat" (past state) and "she eating" (present state), the same way we say, "she happy" (present state). There's also a neat feature in Mandarin Chinese, where prepositions can behave similar to verbs, or are technically verbs. For example, you'd say "I mount plane go England", rather than having a separate grammatical category to show your relation to the plane, as well as "I in school read book", where "in" (在) is the used as the verbal phrase "to be in". With this it becomes super easy to just connect noun to predicate to noun non-linearly without worrying about a bunch of parts of speech. You can also have some way of showing which noun is the agent or patient of the sentence, and also have some way to mark to show the subject (basically where to start reading from). Perhaps a small bubble between agent and predicate containers, and then little dashes around subject containers maybe. (Oyit9GF)

[@uluscri]

toki! I was actually thinking of solutions to these exact points over the past few days. I agree that verbs and adjectives being put on containers as describers makes a lot of sense, and it can be ambiguous whether or not a describer is a verb or an adjective--either could mean the same thing. Sort of like how "the dog is green" and "the green dog" mean the same thing. There are better examples out there, but it gets the point across. That's a cool example! I'm constantly intrigued by the diversity of ways different languages can describe the same sentence. And as a visual, pictorial language, a nonlinear lang has even more capacity to be straightforward and creative in its presentation. Like, I was thinking that situations like "going to..." "running to..." etc could be represented with a line starting at whatever container is moving and ending in an arrow at wherever they're moving towards. Gets the idea across. I like where this brainstorming is going, thanks for the ideas!

[@stephenwaldron2748]

@@uluscri I had scribbled together an example yesterday with these ideas that I wanted to share, but it's 2024 and we can't have nice things (I've had bad experiences with links)... I also probably (definitely) got a few mistakes in there with respect to what was explained in the video. The phrase reads (or is supposed to read), "A life, unchanging, filled with time and trapped in space, reveals unpredictability and brings forth a motion that gives rise to chaos and to life." I uploaded it to imgur, the code at the bottom is its address.

[@uluscri]

@@stephenwaldron2748 oh shit, that's really cool! i tried putting that code after imgur.com/ in the webaddress, then imgur.com/gallery/ but neither worked ;_; idk how to use imgur very well, if you couldn't tell haha. where should i put the code? also, that sentence is awesome, especially the "filled with time, trapped in space" bit. now i wanna see the drawn version even more haha

[@jane_gorelove]

this is very similar to the ideas I've been using to create and improve a system for creating chaos magic sigils! tbh the whole thing evolved past being constrained by the tenets of chaos magic and is blossoming into a whole highly syncretic+agnostic belief system, but it still started as an attempt to understand sigilization in magic rituals. this might inspire me to make a video about it too, so thanks^^ (also as a writer and personal language variation enjoyer love how you omit 'e' after 'l' in words like squiggl and angls!!)

[@uluscri]

oh that sounds cool! do let me know when the video's out. I love when things expand beyond their initial bounds, it's awesome! (also thank you!)

[@zagle1772]

the symbol for nothing in a container is cool because you could imagine that as being where the symbol for zero comes from

[@uluscri]

that's a cool way of looking at it, hell yeah! I'm still thinking of a number system (right now it only goes to 3, lol), and that could be a fun way of representing zero

[@myspleenisbursting4825]

In Malay, the word for empty (as in a container) became the word for zero

[@uluscri]

I should've known that real language is so diverse that this has already happened lol. That's really cool! Also I hope your spleen is ok lmao

[@arrunzo]

Cool language! I love seeing your passion shine through in this video! I'm a little surprised no one else has mentioned this yet, but your language reminds me of the written language "Heptapod B", originally mentioned in Ted Chiang's short story "Story of Your Life" and later in the movie adaptation "Arrival". Heptapod B is similarly non-linear and one must know the layout of the entire sentence before starting to write it. Your written language also slightly reminds me of some old, obscure writing system for numbers that I can't remember the name of for the life of me. Anyway, cool stuff!

[@uluscri]

Thanks! I've seen Arrival, but I forgot that part of the language, very cool!

[@vioname]

This is so cool! Hope to see more from you!

[@uluscri]

Thank you!

[@Hwelhos]

Amazing video! It reminds me of non-configurationality so it could be worth taking a look into. Also what if a container is in the container of a noun or verb? Also what if a symbol is placed in the sentence container without any container on it of a verb or noun? I think that could create far more artistic things, for example what if a symbol that is not in a container is a verb, and the emit one looks like it could hold encompass another symbol, in that case the verb would be the container of the object.

[@uluscri]

A lot of good questions! I've since changed how the grammar/syntax works (containers are not nearly as important, and verbs can point freely from subject to object), but these kinds of questions are still cool to explore. I want the lang to be artistic and creative, and the more flexible I can make it while still preserving meaning, the better.

[@SystemofEleven]

Wow, and I thought my "nonlinear" language was wibbly wobbly... This is awesome!

[@uluscri]

Thank you so much!

[@verifizierterjurist]

That's really dope. keep on doing this fucked up stuff man!

[@uluscri]

Oh I will, you can count on that

[@monsterdetective]

This is a very cool idea, it could be a spoken language as well if each container type was a suffix or something. Then it would likely play out similar to a language with free word order

[@uluscri]

thanks! I've been developing the grammar in the days after I filmed this, and though in the video it could have been spoken like you said, now i dont think it's possible bc a lot of the grammar is more visual. like for many transitive verbs, the direct object is being pointed to by an arrow on the verb. tho also, what am I saying? it's not strictly IMPOSSIBLE to make it into a spoken language, it would just be really difficult. could be a fun exercise down the road, come to think of it. really the main difficulty would be the grammar since the content symbols can be spoken pretty easily

[@Ockerlord]

A does verb X to object B and C and does verbs Y and Z to object D. So something like that would be easily represented as a graph. Interesting.

[@uluscri]

yeah! so there would be no "and" symbol bc you could just have multiple subjects connect to the same verb or multiple verbs connect to the same subject, etc.

[@bartoszgawe9856]

Hi, very nice idea! I think in the case of multiple nouns in the sentence, the subject can just be the bigger one (this way you dont have to introduce new markers). Also, have you considered containers overlapping, kinda like a Venn diagram? This way you could have multiple verbs be used to one noun (which could be equivalent to an "and" symbol)

[@uluscri]

thank you! i already have a version of "and" where i connect multiple nouns to one verb (ive decided to not have verbs be in containers), but i really like the idea of a Venn Diagram like object, but don't know what it would mean exactly in the language lol

[@viiizzaalishvili9967]

this reminded me of Uscript by the creator of Dscript, on their website he has like 2 PDFs of Uscript description

[@viiizzaalishvili9967]

its also non spoken and is ment to be like "modular", making it easy to add more "vocabulary" if you want to talk about different things

[@uluscri]

ooo very interesting I gotta check this out!

[@Deskora]

This looks amazing! Also, what notebook is that? It looks so handy.

[@uluscri]

Thanks! It's a lil leatherbound notebook from KSWB Leather from Seattle.

[@Deskora]

Thank you! ❤

[@abdullahmertozdemir9437]

what are the languages you know? I feel like you could find this non-linear sentence structure in many agglutinative languages (why is there a red squiggly line under "agglutinative"? It is the correct spelling). For example, even though it may not sound as natural or prescriptively not correct grammatically all the time, you could say both "Kapıyı kapatır mısın?" and "Kapatır mısın kapıyı?" in Turkish and it would have the exact same meaning (it means "Could you close the door?" btw). Since the words carry their "describers" along with them as their suffixes, you can practically move them around. The 2 words in the example sentence are divided to their individual parts as kapı-yı and kapat-ır-mı-sın, and these individual suffixes could potentially be thought of as individual markers which allow the final word to be placed anywhere in the sentence while still keeping their intended meaning, am I right? Good video btw, subscribed. Your minecraft videos look good I will check them out

[@uluscri]

I know English and some Swedish, German, and Latin. I know Latin is very much like that, and I think Nahuatl (tho I haven't learned any of it)? I was thinking of this as I was developing it, and I've since changed the grammar a fair bit. Not to say it's a bad idea (there's def a lot of merit to it if done right), but it's not the direction I decided to go with. Right now, the syntax looks a lot more similar to UNLWS, with verbs able to be pointed directly from symbol to symbol without the need for containers. Containers still exist, but have more niche purposes. This is all to say: I need to eventually make another video about this lang haha

[@AsiJirka]

Never delved into conlangs and all I know is some random tidbits from recommend videos, so maybe terrible question. Is not every sentence in english language somewhat of a container? Like you start with word with capital letter and end it with . or ? or !.

[@uluscri]

Good question, and I agree! I never thought of it like a linear container, but it makes sense.

[@imlemonth]

it looks cool

[@uluscri]

thanks!

[@kilrati]

it's pretty cool

[@uluscri]

Thank you!

[@imlemonth]

22:34 i think it's called predicative adjective or smth like that

[@uluscri]

ye, a quick google shows that in this case, unpredictable is that. I'd completely forgotten predicative adjective exists as a term lol