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File: 1415207290456.jpeg (23.99 KB, 300x400, 3:4, curious wapanese bitch.jpeg)

 No.89

Are there any languages that don't have so many interpretations to the same word given the context being slightly different?
"Stuff" as a noun, for example can be just a bunch of miscellaneous things, while "stuff" as a verb can mean to force something into something else.
This is what tires me about English; It's not that it's difficult to figure out the interpretations, but it feels like there's no elegance or anything to the wording.

 No.93

I may be wrong but I think all natural languages are one way or another syntactically ambiguous. Lojban is an artificial language created with the express purpose of syntactic unambiguity and logical consistency.

 No.134

All cultures will use at least some bits of context in their languages, but some more than others. So you have at one side the German-speaking Swissmen who barely put any context in their discourse, and at the other the Japanese who manage to swap almost a whole sentence with a "nee" and let the interlocutor infer the rest from the context.

Also, note that this is more about the culture as a whole than just the language - so a bunch of Japanese speaking German would still use lots of context, and Swissmen speaking Japanese would do the inverse.

 No.256

>>89
One good language to look at would be latin. The parts of speech, for the most part, are labeled in the sentence for you as shown by the various endings of words. There is a lot less room for confusion and inference in latin.

 No.269

>>256
Theoretically, yes… in the practice, some cases resemble a lot each other, specially in casual speech.

And since the declensions "mark" the role of each thing in the sentence, the speakers swap them from place to place, so the odds for confusion end being up pretty much the same.

 No.906

>>89

>>256

>>269

If you want a language where hard to miss thing, then I can offer Hungarian. I don't say that it can't be confusing sometimes, but grammatically everything is based on small connections.

We of course have words with wildly different meanings as a verb or as a noun, but in practice it's never really a problem.

For example "nyúl" means rabbit as a noun, and something like "reach out and grab it" (or maybe reach after) as a verb. But the sentence "I reach after the rabbit" is this: A nyúlért nyúlok. Literally it would be something like is: The rabbit(for) reach out(I).


 No.930

File: 1433611080364.jpg (6.87 KB, 100x50, 2:1, 121224_foergraphic_p100.jpg)

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-beginners

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil

>Hunched over the dining-room table, Quijada showed me how he would translate “gawk” into Ithkuil. First, though, since words in Ithkuil are assembled from individual atoms of meaning, he had to engage in some introspection about what exactly he meant to say.

>For fifteen minutes, he flipped backward and forward through his thick spiral-bound manuscript, scratching his head, pondering each of the word’s aspects, as he packed the verb with all of gawking’s many connotations. As he assembled the evolving word from its constituent meanings, he scribbled its pieces on a notepad. He added the “second degree of the affix for expectation of outcome” to suggest an element of surprise that is more than mere unpreparedness but less than outright shock, and the “third degree of the affix for contextual appropriateness” to suggest an element of impropriety that is less than scandalous but more than simply eyebrow-raising. As he rapped his pen against the notepad, he paged through his manuscript in search of the third pattern of the first stem of the root for “shock” to suggest a “non-volitional physiological response,” and then, after several moments of contemplation, he decided that gawking required the use of the “resultative format” to suggest “an event which occurs in conjunction with the conflated sense but is also caused by it.” He eventually emerged with a tiny word that hardly rolled off the tongue: apq’uxasiu. He spoke the first clacking syllable aloud a couple of times before deciding that he had the pronunciation right, and then wrote it down in the script he had invented for printed Ithkuil: [see pic]


 No.936

>>930

Quijada deems his creation too complex and strictly regular a language to have developed naturally, but nonetheless a language suited to human conversation. No person, including Quijada, is known to be able to speak Ithkuil fluently

The ultimate hipster language.


 No.939

>>936

Natural languages are so mainstream these days geeze…

Conlangs is where it's at.


 No.954

>>930

That article's pretty spooky, man.

Imagine the first people that start studying your language are crazed Ukrainian Hitlers.




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