Conlanging draft notes

There are at least three applicable selves:

  1. The Self of Experience. This self is in posession of memory; it goes to bed in the evening, awakens in the morning, and sees a continuity. This is the most likely self which an individual, superficially, sees as their own identity.
  2. The Self of Intent. This self is in posession of desire, personality, and character; it governs the bounds of ego-syntonia. Senses of gratitude and desires for vengeance are both the property of this self. This is what may crudely be described as a „personality”.
  3. The Corporeal Self. This is the self which others, again superficially, may see as an individual’s identity. This self has a physical location in both space and time, posesses an appearance, and posesses genetic and other familial relationships.

This is not intended to be an exhaustive list; it is based solely on concepts which I, personally, have had difficulty speaking about due to languages I am familiar with failing to draw a distinction. The language design should therefore not assume that the number of self concepts will remain at three. This is relevant to the design of „first”, „second” and „third” persons, should they exist at all as a built-in concept; it might be advisable to avoid morphological person altogether.

Láadan’s evidentials are too phonetically similar to one another.

Evidentials, of all words, should be very different from one another. Common evidentials should be short; uncommon and impactful evidentials should be long and highly distinctive. It should not be possible to mistake one evidential for another due to a suboptimal recording, background noise, poor pronunciation (due to lack of practice, illness or impediment) or any other confounding factor.

Some evidentials which makes sense to include (these may be compounds of more atomic units):

The strongest religious convictions are expected to be expressed mostly in terms of the sure deductive evidential. Contrary to what some may believe from some segments of testimony-bearing culture and the expectation to make (or even believe) hyperbolic statements about how surely you „know” a church is true, use of the testificatory evidential in regard to one’s religious convictions carries connotations of insincerity, guillability, extremism and other poor associations. Respectful discourse about religious convictions you do not hold are expected to make heavy use of the axiomatic evidential and weak plain evidential.

Evidentials as above could probably be accomplished with a few atomic morphemes: — Strong, weak and sure morphemes. — Plain, indirect, direct, deductive and axiomatic morphemes. — An oath infix.

That an oath infix is sacrosanct in a creed-independent manner warrents explanation about the religion model of the community.

The term translated God does not correspond exactly to the English concepts of God, god, deity or even Divinity. The term „belief in God” has no direct translation—although related concepts, such as „belief that God is mindful of us” do. „Faith in God” translates, but only in the sense of „trust in God”.

The meaning of the term is perhaps closest to the English phrase powers that Be, but does not necessarily imply a supernatural force. Some may see it as such; others see it solely as a personification of the phenomena of serendipity and cosmic perversity alike. If circumstances conspired to stop you from doing something, in a manner not readily attributable to an interfering human, God forbade it. If many things so happened to fall together in a remarkably fortunate fashion, that was an act of God or, alternatively translated, an act of Serendipity. No distinction is drawn between serendipitous and miraculous occurrances. As such, one may see God as a person, a pantheon, a primordeal emanation, a karmic law or a poetic personification; one may trust God as a guiding and protecting entity, regard God as a malevolent entity to be pacified, or see no meaning in either of these views. As such, to „not believe in God” is not a concept which meaningfully exists.

This understanding runs deep into the language. No morphological concept of a future tense exists; tenses are plain versus perfect. The primary distinction between present and future events is that present events are those for which coming to pass is a foregone conclusion, but which are not yet complete; future events are those which unpredictable transpirations may ultimately preclude. As such, an idiom roughly equivalent to „God willing” (or „if so will the powers that Be”) is a fundamental part of the grammar used when describing future events.

The distinction between a scientific and fundamental question has been well-understood from the beginning. Discourse is common between religious views, and reactionary theology is widely viewed as a fringe approach: religion is viewed as a human attempt to perceive and interpret the Divine (as above defined), and none is viewed as set in stone. Although the formation of closed canons is difficult to avoid entirely, viewing a closed canon as the last word on a topic is not really in line with the wider culture; open canons are common where a coherent subcommunity can agree over managing one.

As sacrosanct, or moreso, than this generalised God concept is that of Honour or Integrity. This does not derive from God, is respected by mankind and may or may not be directly recognised or responded to by God, depending on view. It is also not directly affected by victimless actions: although some such actions may be seen as disrespecting or even blaspheming Integrity, only actions which impact others impact one’s own Integrity. This includes misleading people.