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Topic: TW-ligt plot (Read 41213 times)
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Chrispy
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Vlik Dweller
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It just wouldnt be as linguistically rich in my oppinion.
But, it would sure be fun to make.
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Deus Siddis
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I can't be an elitist, I hate myself. I don't like my own language. I'm also a very visual person. When I hear something, I visualize it. I'm not trying to blast at people on something as stupid as this. That was my original point, there is no sense in attacking one flawed language, using another flawed language. I just used an over the top manner of speech, to make this point. I'm used to using it in other forums I visit, where people don't really take things too seriously and are joking most of the time.
Anyway, I'm sorry I've been such an ass in this thread, I was joking on everything, and did not know it was going to upset anyone. I will delete my posts, if anyone wishes.
P.S. If you want a species that's elitist and uses "disgusting" a lot, I've got an idea for one. I call them the Vux.
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Deus Siddis
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Is there a compiled version of TWL somewhere? I found TW a while back, but I never figured out where TWL was.
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Deus Siddis
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It downloaded ok, but when I tryed to use it, a warning came up that said the installer was corrupted. I guess there is something about my system that it doesn't like.
Is it xp compatible?
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Yurand
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I love YaBB 1G - SP1!
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This is internal release, I was not intend to give it to public. Next official release will come soon (this week I think), it will include much more then dialog samples.
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Art
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Make a simple marking system, say from 1 to 10. Make up 10 random words. Now if you use the word corresponding to 1 you have a very unintense feeling. If you use the word corresponding to 10 it's extremely intense.
And you can even make them funny and logical! Just create a setting like
Gu -1
Gugu - 2
and so on til
Gugu Gugu Gugu Gugu Gu. Now placing this infront of a feeling will indicate that you feel this extremely intensly. This way, the word for love and like could be the same.
This is like George Orwell's Newspeak in 1984 -- Newspeak supposedly is a conscious attempt to super-simplify "Oldspeak" (English) by drastically cutting down on the number of words and word forms. The only term that expresses approval for something is "good", and the only way to negate an adjective is with "un", and the only way to make an adjective stronger is to put "plus" in front of it, and the only way to strengthen an adverb like "plus" is to put "double" in front of it. So some really strong term like "absolutely intolerable" becomes "doubleplusungood". Needless to say the point of it was to destroy the poetic and creative instinct in people and get them to have limited thoughts by limiting their language.
In real life, something as extreme as your "gugu" example would almost certainly not work, because people don't think in simple quantitative terms. You could probably take ten real English words that meant something positive and rank them in order from least
positive to most positive ("nice" to "decent" to "great" to "wonderful" to "spectacular"), but the only reason we can tell the difference between these words in our heads is because they differ *qualitatively* rather than quantitatively. There's no way that anyone could actually perceive a difference between "gugugugu" and "gugugugugu" any more than in real life "really, really, really great" means that much more than "really, really, really, really great". "Wonderful" means more than just "really great", as does "spectacular", which is why we *use* those words instead of just tacking on "really" or "very" onto "great" or "good" -- it's the connotations that keep them in our vocabulary.
This is most obvious for your example, with "like" and "love" -- surely you can tell that "I love you" means something very different from "I like you", or even "I really really really like you very very much".
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Deus Siddis
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Perhaps that is because "like" and "love" mean different things, not the same thing to a different degree.
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Art
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The point is that *all* words mean (at least slightly) different things, rather than expressing a clear, quantitative difference in degree. That's *why* we don't just add "very" to adjectives to make them more intense -- even words that seem to be close synonyms have a certain flavor that makes them different from each other, and that's why they make a language's vocabulary rich.
I imply a lot of different things if I call something "mediocre" than if I call it "average", even though the strict dictionary definition of those terms is the same. Same deal with calling something "awesome" and calling it "marvelous", or calling someone "gauche" versus "awkward" versus "ill at ease".
You can't simplify the definitions of terms to the point that you could, as with a computer variable, say that they're simply different "degrees" or "levels" of intensity. In fact it's very rare that real words are quantitative to that degree at all -- in most cases the vast number of definable differences between words are qualitative.
There's a lot more to the word "awful" than just a strong form of "bad". And once you've separated "awful", "terrible", "horrible", "loathsome", and so forth from "bad", "unsatisfying", "mediocre" and so on, how can you say for sure whether "horrible" or "loathsome" is worse? The difference is one of the subjective feelings attached to the terms rather than simple degree -- because that's how human beings think.
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Art
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...I might add that your own unfortunate recent example gives the lie to the idea that words can be defined by degree. For instance I would be quite a bit more offended to hear my language called "unrefined-sounding" than "gross-sounding" or "disgusting-sounding". (Though, frankly, using *any* negative term there is kind of offensive, and not funny.)
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Deus Siddis
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You can insult english anytime you want, in whatever way you want. I won't be offended. I probably will think it's funny.
You could also insult my internet service. That is another part of my communication system. But it's not me, nor is the language that I speak.
If "mediocre" and "average" are considered to have two different meanings, than perhaps they really are two different meanings. It doesn't make too big of a difference what the dictionary says, if people choose to use words in another way. That's just how language evolves, and that's the reason we're not all using middle english, or old english (which weren't much better, I might add).
Oh, I'd like to add something else to the list, no silent letters.
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Art
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Well, *yes*, which is all I was saying. *In real life* all these words have different meanings. There *are* no words that simply increase the degree of intensity of another word. That's natural language, and that's why it's impossible to ever make up a language where all words have clear, simple meanings and you can do something like have ten clear quantitative gradations of intensity for a word.
In any case -- not dictionary definition -- the baseline, simple meaning of "average" and "mediocre" are the *same* -- they both mean something isn't particularly different from the things around it. "Mediocre", however, comes off as negative -- it implies you were expected to be different from those around you -- while "average" does not. It's a shade of meaning that's useful -- people use it a lot -- and would probably be missed if a bunch of people decided to make up a new language with one word for "average".
As far as language mockery -- it doesn't matter whether language is an intrinsic part of one's identity or not. It's annoying to bring it up as something to mock, just as it would be if people started coming out of the woodwork to rag on AOL users if you were an AOL user, or to rag on high school students if you were in high school. It's not that it's racist or whatever, just irrelevant and not really funny.
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