From this overpowering... Sense that... That we grew up with. That... You know, that... That aUi ould be the language for peace through understanding. And... And... And... World wars happen every 30 years, my father said. And an average throughout history about... Every generation there are some kind of world wars. At least I felt it as a child. Well, not mandate, but at least pressure to... You know, that... That if I didn't continue this, it would be... It would be a disaster and so forth.
Welcome to Conlangery, the podcast about constructed languages and the people who create them. I'm George Corley. And with me in the great state of Washington is Andrea Weilgard. And Andrea is the daughter of the creator of aUi, the language of space. So, Andrea, how are you doing? Well, thank you so much, George, for inviting me. And I've tried to prepare. I've approached this with some trepidation because I'm thinking of this as mostly a linguistic approach.
And so I'm feeling like I'm not necessarily have all the necessary background, but I'm sure. I've spent a lot, most of my life or a lot of my life working with aUi. So that's that's something that has interested me for a long time. And I don't know, though, as far as you know, how it is received in the linguistic community.
Yes. Well, I. When you had someone contacted me and said you were interested in coming on, it was interesting to me because aUi is one of those languages that at least when I started with the conlanging community, it's sort of like it's it's one of those languages that floats around as like an example of something unique. And I thought it would be interesting to. Hear from someone close to the the creator and hear a little bit about. About the language to start with.
Can you can you talk to me a little bit about how you have been involved with this language and and. Apparently sort of continuing on your father's legacy and like. How how did that develop? You did you grow up learning about it or how did that work? Well, my sister and I and mostly I were kind of co-opted as my father's guinea pigs and in in. Writing the symbols on the board during classes in.
his - some of his seminars on the psychology of communication at Luther College, and he would always he at first actually they started in our home and it was very informal and my mother would have dessert at the end and it was just in our small little living room and and we'd be the ones writing the symbols on this big huge heavy slate board slate real true real heavy slate. And then we'd sometimes play these word guessing games, which was, you know, that was that was kind of fun and.
And then later it got moved to the college as a class up at the college and a seminar evening seminar and we were always expected to go every Monday night from seven to nine and. So, and in addition to that. We did a lot of typing of my father's. German - written German shorthand written in English manuscripts of a different book actually that never got published but but also the sequel to the aUi book, which is the.
Cosmic elements of meaning, is it more of a kind of a philosophy behind the the symbology and. So. We would spend cuz at that time we didn't have a good enough typewriter so we we typed we got to use the. One of the offices IBM typewriters in the during the off hours so we'd be up there in the wee hours of. Typing and and so anyway, so yeah so and you know, and I always thought that there there it was it was. It always drew me because of the, really the beauty and simplicity of the symbols.
And there was, you know, I, you know, as, as, as a teenager, it, it was, you know, not necessarily my favorite thing to do because it wasn't, it was sort of expected, but, and, but still, I saw my father's, you know, I really felt deeply, I guess, because I'm the older one, felt deeply his idealistic, this as an idealistic cause. And he, however, you know, he taught it, and in our family, it was almost like this, I don't know, it was almost like a mission.
And so, which I wish and other, other professors at the college, I think, or at least a few have, have said, you know, that it would have been better if he had done actual research with the language. And, and so that's kind of the direction that I would be more interested, although I also come from this background of spreading it in, in, in popularizing it. So I'm kind of in between these two worlds, because it's not, no, it still doesn't seem to be well known enough.
And, and also, every attempt that we have made in the past to, to approach linguists, at least at that time, you know, 20, 30 years ago or more, there wasn't, there wasn't an interest for that. And, at all, even back in, even back in 20-, 2001, when I went to the LSA Linguistics Summer Institute on Linguistics or Semantics or whatever it was, Linguistics Institute at Berkeley, not Berkeley, not at, at Santa Barbara.
I talked with several professors there, and, you know, they see it as a historical, historical, one, or at the kind of a, maybe a, the final... A relic, right? Well, yeah, but a final example of this long, long, centuries long search for a language that based on semantic primitives. And so, but as far as... taking it seriously from a linguistic standpoint, you know, either they say it's too complicated or they say it's too simplistic.
And so, but anyway, but so there's always been something that has drawn me back to it. And so after my father passed away in 1981, I kind of felt that at some point I was going to get back to it. And I was just waiting for someone to... support me and help me in that endeavor. And I wish I could have gotten a degree in linguistics and, but even then at that time, you know, conlangs were not something that was supported in a research sense.
I think, I think now within the last, I don't know, 10 years, that might've been more something that might be possible. Anyway, anyway. So I've talked about that. Well, I, I will say... Conlangs in general have not really, have more recently gotten some, some respect from academics, but like, even when I was starting grad school, I was not, I was iffy about like how much I wanted to talk about conlanging with, with my professors, right? Because I didn't know what their reaction would be.
And then something like aUi, seeing how it is. And it's, that might be even more because it is quite a radical experiment. So, um, if you're on the audio behind Andrea is, are the, uh, the, the entirety of the symbols that make up aUi. Is that right? That that's, that's the whole chart, right? Yeah. So the phonemes as well as the phonemes. The, the, the sememes, is that what you, is that what we're calling?
Well, the, yeah, the, the graphemes and the phonemes and the, and each, and each individual segment is, is a morpheme on its own. Right. Um, and so this is what nowadays at, at the time, this terminology wasn't there. This is what we would nowadays call an oligosynthetic language, where it has a very minimal. Set of roots that are combined in order to make more meanings.
Can you tell me about like, what was, why was choice made to have these very few primitive roots and like how that was used to construct how that is, is used to construct larger words? I think my father's idea was to find concepts. That all languages and cultures had in common and the fact that you need in order to have a language. You know, with a phoneme assigned to each morpheme. Um, there's a certain, there's, of course, a limitation right there. Because the most common phonemes.
Um, pretty much comprise the, the alphabet as we know it. Um, and so, uh, unless you get really crazy and I mean, uh, no, um, unless you go to more exotic languages, I guess, uh, I don't know if that's the right term either. Just, uh, uh, languages that are not familiar in the Western world. Shall we say? As much. Uh-huh. And so, um, so, you know, ideally they would be fairly easy to pronounce.
And, uh, they pretty much are, except for Americans, the /y/ and the /ø/ are the ones that, and the /x/ maybe are the ones that are end up being more difficult. But, um, so in order to limit it. Um, by phonemes, you can only have so many morphemes assigned. And, um, also, so, so, and so the way that he, part of the way that he, uh, I think came to identify them is, I mean, aside from his, his studying of almost a dozen different languages, including Japanese.
He, um, took, uh, he, there was some kind of process, I think, as I understood it, where he would take words and, and keep going, like, in the dictionary, keep going down, finding simpler and simpler definitions. And, and then when the definition became circular, um, then, you know, then you, you find the most basic ones that aren't defined in any more simpler terms. And, um, um, um, and usually what happens, they become circular in the dictionary.
And then you start using the other, the word that you, that you use to define it. So, so he, and, and of course, also from his background in philosophy and, um, you know, um, he came to, to posit that these could be. Potentially universal, or at least represented in other languages in some form, not necessarily, not necessarily lexemically represented, but the concept be represented. Right.
But that's, that, that's an interesting process to go through because like, uh, just to, to let the audience know that, that. Right. It's, it's sort of getting into a cyclical, uh, um, uh, sort of a loop, uh, in definitions that will happen with any dictionary. Because we don't, dictionaries can only define words by other words, but in the real, in reality, the way that words are defined are based on connecting them to something in the world. Right. So, so it's interesting.
It's interesting that he was going and, you know, finding these loops and then trying to figure out what is like the essential meaning that could be shared by, by different languages. It's a, it's an interesting thought experiment and it's an interesting experiment. It is, um, now I do want to go, go into, there are some claims about aUi. That, that, that were made.
That I kind of want to address because there are, and as you said, there wasn't really research done on it, but there were, there were claims that made that like it would help defend against propaganda in certain ways. And there were claims made that it was less arbitrary than natural languages. And I kind of want to poke at that because those are big claims to make.
Um, and to me, like first, first of all, looking at the arbitrariness, I would say that even, even when you're thinking about trying to make the, this, the symbols that you have up are, are trying to be iconic. But there's still some amount of arbitrariness to their, their... Yeah. To, to choosing them. Right? And also bigger claims about, um, making a language that will change the way people think.
There are a lot of like engineered languages that make that claim or that people make that claim about. And I mean, it's hard to see what the, I'm not sure what the evidence is for that. Right. So can you address those? Well, okay. So as far as arbitrariness, you may ultimately, um, language is, okay, so here's a question. Is it not possible to have a, is arbitrariness on a, on a scale so that, you know, it's neither a fully non -arbitrary or it's fully arbitrary so that, I mean, yes, I think.
If you connect, um, the symbols and sound with some kind of rationale that relates it to reality, then is that make it a slightly less or somewhat less arbitrary? I suppose it can. Like, um, if I, if I looking at your chart. So your, um, your symbol for round Is a good example. It's like a circle that's inside another circle. I can see that the symbol, the written simple itself is what we is fairly what we would call iconic.
Iconic means that the, the, the linguistic form is itself representative of what it means in the real world in some way. Right? Um, and we can. In, in natural languages, we do find iconicity like this. Uh, we find it in syntax. We find it, um, uh, where like, um, serial verb constructions will follow a temporal order. That is the same as the temporal order that you would have. You would find in sign languages, actually. Sign languages seem to have more iconicity than, uh. Uh, oral languages.
For what reason, it's hard to say, but like, I believe, like, like, um, like ASL for, uh, milk is this. Right. Milking a cow's udders. Right? So you can have signs in a language. Um, you can have symbols in, uh, in a language that are. closer to what it represents in the real world. There's, I, I believe, I, I believe that there's always going to be some amount of jump just because if nothing else you're filtering through human perception.
Yeah. Um, but there's always going to be some kind of arbitrary mapping. There has to be. There has to be. Yes. Because. But there, there definitely is a scale, as you say. Yeah. And there, I, I could see that there, you could make an argument that aUi is maybe less arbitrary, at least in the written symbols. In the, the, the sort of the sound to meaning mapping. Uh, maybe. I, I, I, I saw on your site that you have rationales for. For why the sounds were chosen for the meanings. Mm-hmm.
And that is, that seems like less of a connection for a lot of them, but still makes some sense. Well, you know, I mean, language, language is so complex. Yeah. And it's, and it's a, it's a concept of the mind. It's, it's trying to put ethereal thought, thinking into. Into, you know, our, our thoughts, our ethereal thoughts into something, um, that is expressible verbally and sounds put to it. And then another person to understand that and, and how to do that.
I mean, how to compared to conventional language. I mean, it just seems like. So still quite. A ways down, uh, away from relatively speaking, uh, less arbitrary than what you would find in conventional language. Um, so, I mean, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, as you can see here, a doc before a line means before it's, it's, it's in front of, uh, the mind. And it's a plosive. It's, it's, uh, you, you puff the air out. In, in front of the lips. And /b/ is a bilabial stop.
It's, it's easy to see how the lips are pressed together and it means together and so forth. And /k/ is, is articulated in the upper pallet. Uh, upper velum. If that's correct. And /g/ is felt to be more inside. /g/ Um, and, and so forth. And, um, /i/ is the brightest sound. It has the highest frequency. Um, and so /i/, and it's a front. It's a forward. It's a frontal vowel. /i/ And so it's bright and front and /iː / sound. Sound wave. Um, is just held longer. So because sound travels.
More slowly than light. And so forth. Then. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And those are. These are all very interesting. Like. Ideas of how. How. How these go. At the same time. I can see. Like. Even in the ones that you are pointing out. There are. Still some. Choices made. Like you say. Okay. A dot before the line. For before. Now. That. Still only makes sense. Once you have chosen. The writing direction for the script. Uh. Which. Happens to me the same as. As. What English does. Is. Uh. Left to right.
And. And there's also. You know. Because the. The symbols are still pretty abstract. You. You still have. Sort of. A. A. Situation. Of. Of. They've been. They've been reduced quite a bit. From. From what maybe an even more representative thing would be. And there are also ones in there. Like, bood is clearly a plus sign. Negation, probably is derived from a negative sign, right? So. Because is covers -- it negates what is below it. Okay. But. It is interesting.
I think I concede that there are symbols in there that are more iconic than is typical for words in a language. But. But, you know, there's still some level of arbitrariness. I do want to say like. There's also the claims that this language will change the way you think, And change the way you perceive things. Well, that remains to be... Yeah. Tested, I suppose. I mean... You... I don't know how much you know how the language came about. You know, my father's... His...
He was a young man under Hitler at the time that Hitler came to power. And he was very... Realized... I mean... And experienced the plethora of slogans that were around at the time that the... What is it? The Department of Language Manipulation under Hitler's regime. They very intentionally used language and slogans to emotionally, you know, reach the masses of people listening to them on... When he spoke to masses of people. And these alliterative slogans... And they are...
Common in most... Any... I mean... In many situations in our politics today. That make use of this... These similar sounds. The... The... Parachesis? Have you heard of that? Parachesis? Anyway. Alliteration. And... And... My father's... The one... One of the research... Researchers that he did cite was Gregory Razran. And... His... Idea... Of... Who did this research on semantic conditioning. And... My father's conclusion... Was... That... Though... That the...
Or... His... His... His... Idea was... That... Though the conscious mind may think in synonyms, but the... Subconscious mind may associate in assonance. And... And I would have to... Luria and Vinogradova is the paper here. An objective investigation of the dynamics of semantic systems. And... This is in the British Journal of Psychology. It's... It's from 1959. And... So... What they did was they... They... Performed some classical conditioning experiments on subjects that...
Using words as a stimulant. And... It would be better if I just read this. Is... Is that okay? Yeah. You can read it. You can read that. Um... Yeah. It's just one... It's just a little paragraph here. Um... One such method was applied by Schwartz in 48, 49. Recording the change in light sensitivity of a dark-adapted eye resulting from a sudden illumination. Uh... She then combined the sudden illumination with the pronouncing by the experiment of the word... Doctor... Uh... Meaning physician.
After a few combinations, this word, which up till then had been neutral, began to provoke a conditioned reflex. Okay. So that's... That's a conditioned... Uh... Response. And... Lowering the thresholds of light sensitivity. But as the experiment showed, such a lowering of the thresholds of light sensitivity was uh... Objectively provoked by the use of a number of other equivalent words too. And a normal adult subject knew such words as... These are Russian. врач (vrač) and ле́кар (lékar).
Both meaning physician. Which sound completely different, but which are equivalent to the key word in meaning. And tests carried out to check this showed that words similar in sound, but pertaining to a different sense group... Uh... For instance, the word ди́ктор (díktor), which means announcer, did not act as a... As equivalent stimuli and did not provoke a corresponding change in the thresholds of light sensitivity.
However, if the subject was given the appropriate dose of chloral hydrate and the cortex was put into inhibitory... an inhibitory state, the system of equivalent links changed. And now, the patient being in a drowsy state, the word díktor, which is similar in sound, to the key word of dóktor, began to provoke the same conditioned reflex in sensitivity, while the synonyms... The synonymous words lékar and vrač lost their characteristic... Their character of equivalent stimuli.
Analogous tests have been carried out using different objective indicators... With salivary and galvanic skin and vascular reactions and depression of electrical activity of the brain and so forth. Blood coagulation reactions. And so, I mean, I do think it's intriguing that consciously, we over... I mean, I'm making these conclusions. That consciously, we may be able to override those associations that we subconsciously may tend to make. Between similar sounds versus similar meanings.
And so, that the disparity that conventional language has in those two systems He was trying to rectify, I guess, or bring into kind of an isomorphic harmony so that if it sounds similar, it also means similar. Yeah. Then that is interesting. So, and I'm not up on the psychological research. So, I'm not necessarily going... I'm not going to attack that result necessarily.
Let's take it as a given that we can have situations where we associate homophones versus other cases where we associate synonyms. That seems to make sense that we can be influenced in that way. How much does aUi really address that? Because, yes, a similar sound is going to have a similar meaning, but you also have a very few phones. Available. And I think it's worth talking about the way that you build words with this language.
You have to put together a bunch of these symbols together and you could end up with pretty similar sounding words that have pretty different meanings still. Right? To some extent. To some extent. But I don't know. I know you talked about that and I don't know that that's really so much the case. I mean, certainly not so much the case as you will find in other-- of a priori language efforts in which they, at least as far as that I've seen, there are, you know, Sona.
I mean, there's, there's all these, I have them listed here somewhere. There's, there's a whole, there's quite a few of -- Ygyde I don't know if that rings a bell to you. It's, it's listed in the Frath Wiki, one of the Frath Wiki entries.
There's like a whole bunch of, of languages and, and that work that with an effort to make them have some meaningful relationship that the letters at least are -- have some innate meaning, but the difference is... and those words that I've seen, they are very similar. Oh my gosh. They would be, it would be very hard to tell them apart because you're still only using letters. And, whereas in aUi.
You have the symbol, the morpheme, the iconic symbol attached to it, which then still makes you be able to differentiate them quite a bit. Yeah, that's... well, that is the case, if it's written. When you are... but it is also meant to have a spoken register with the sounds. And, you know, one thing I would say is that, yes, you have all of these concepts that each have a unique sound, right?
However, another part of that is that some of the sounds, depending on your language background, may sound very similar. /e/ and /i/ can sound very similar to different people, right? So... and then you are ending up with a confusion of the movement in light, right? So, I am interested in all these ideas that go into this language. And I think the process that your father went through to choose the symbols that he did and the... you know, the semantic primitives that he did is very interesting.
I just... you know, I am just poking at some of the claims... Yeah, I understand that. I mean... Yeah. ...you know... Yeah. The thing is that even if... even if, you know, /i/ and /iː / if you can't distinguish that, I mean, they are. .. you know, aUi... I mean, it doesn't actually have greatly different sounds than other languages. I guess I'm not quite sure, and it doesn't... I mean, most languages don't have about this number of phonemes, is that not correct?
Well, I'm just... I was just giving an example. 1Like, /ɛ/ /e/ and /i/ yeah, I was just saying, yeah, I mean, well, so there are. .. So the vowel sounds, there's five vowels and then a length distinction, right? Is that how this... Yeah, so it's /a aː e eː i iː / and /o oː /. Yeah. Popping in with an editor's note, I said in the podcast here that aUi has five vowels, and I was mistaken on that. It actually has seven, because it has /y/ and /ø/ the front rounded vowels.
It's a little bit weird, because /y/ alternates with /j/, probably just from English spelling. But yeah, those vowels are there in the language. So, I mean, when I say depending on your language background, okay, five vowels will work for a lot of human... of a lot of language backgrounds. But not all languages will have a length distinction. And some people, that might get lost on them.
There are a decent number of languages that have only three vowels, the /a/, /i/, and /u/, and they might have slightly more difficulty distinguishing like /e/ from /i/ and /o/ from /u/, right? So, it may depend a little bit on your language background previously, like how effective it is on the phonological side, on the sound side, that separation is. It is definitely a fascinating sort of attempt at some kind of a universal language or a philosophical language.
Yeah. I don't, you know, I have tried to get away from the idea That this is ever going to be spoken internationally. I mean, that's not going to happen, certainly not in our lifetime. I don't know, maybe after the apocalypse with our current situation here, We might have to have a total renewing of everything that has existed so far. But who knows? So... I don't... That's, you know, that's kind of not where I'm at. As you know, any language is going to be difficult for some people to learn.
And we can't... Yeah. It's just not... There's... It's not... I mean, how would you... You... Yeah. How would you do that? I mean, I don't think... I am... I... And as far as an international auxiliary language, that's also, you know, I don't know. That's... I'm trying to be realistic. - And... - Yeah. And so, that's... You know, I'm more interested in it from just more of a research perspective.
And... Oh, and I just... I did want to address that /i/ and /iː /, even though you possibly could confuse those, they are still, you know, /i/ light, /iː / sound. They're still sort of in the realm of something that's related. So, I mean... ...you still, you know, you still have relationships. They are still somewhat -- /u/ and /uː /. I mean, so...
Yeah. And by the way, if I could share the screen at some point, not necessarily right now, I could show how the words sound and related words sound and... Well, you could do that. Yeah. Yeah. Did that address your second question? Yeah. We were talking about the propaganda. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, that pretty much... I mean, that is... You know, my father said that slogans don't cause war.
He said that they possibly can trigger war because they can focus these tensions and frustrations of a people that... At least this was the situation after the First World War. ...and focus them on a scapegoat and so forth. I mean, it's happening now. So... Yeah. And I am sympathetic to that in some ways. I will say, like, slogans can also trigger, like, good actions sometimes, you know? Right. Like, in lots of... There's lots of protests for good... Right. ...for good causes that use slogans.
I would say... Again, I'm just, like, poking at, like, how effective is this at what it's aiming to do? Because that... Ultimately, one of my things I will say about any conlang is you can only judge it by how effective it is at what it's trying to do. Because people come into this, like, art form, science, whatever, with a whole lot of different aims and a whole lot of different practices. And, you know, most... What I do is artistic. I am doing it as an art form.
And I also generally aim to make... Like, naturalistic languages. So this is definitely something that's way outside my comfort zone to be working with, right? But, you know, coming around to looking at aUi, the only way I can judge it is kind of think of, like, what is it aiming to do? And it seems to be that it's aiming to... Change... Change the way people think and communicate in certain specific ways. And I just kind of ask...
And, you know, neither one of us has, like, much hard data on, like, how effective it is, right? And that's one of the things that you want to do is try to get some research involved to see if it does, like, actually have any effect on thinking. Right? Yeah. And I... And I have some... Some... Some examples of things that... I mean, of... Just of some connections in... Or at least projects in psycholinguistics that would be interesting I can mention later. But... But, yeah.
Well, you know, I have... You know, my thinking has, of course, evolved, too. I mean, this is... You know, from... From this overpowering... Sense that... That we grew up with. That... That... That, you know, we needed to... You know, that... That aUi ould be the language for peace through understanding. And... And... And... World wars happen every 30 years, my father said. And an average throughout history about... Every generation there are some kind of world wars. And...
And so he was very... There was a... There was a lot of... At least I felt it as a child. Well, not mandate, but at least pressure to... You know, that... That if I didn't continue this, it would be... It would be a disaster and so forth. And... And... But anyway, I've... That's why it's take... I'm just saying that's why it's taken me so long to come to... To evolve to a more objective viewpoint of aUi and to feel like really ideally it should be a subject to some kind of research.
And I'm... What I'm saying there, not only in this semantic conditioning types of experiments, which I haven't been able to find anything more recent in that direction. - And... - Yeah. And... But... But what we do find more recently is this idea of phonological neighborhood density, and then semantic mapping, you know, mapping versus phonological mapping of brain mapping of where our sounds are produced and where the meanings reside. And...
So that possibly, you know, there could be some research where there... Whether that activation of and location of phonemes or, well, sounds versus meanings in the brain, whether if a language like this might have a difference in that. And I can't... I'm sorry. I can't explain this to you unless I read it to you. But there are some papers that I have here loaded up. But anyway, so that's where I think it's really more... That's where it's at more for me in a realistic way. Yeah. Maybe. Maybe.
Maybe. Maybe. Well, I mean, it may be something worth investigating. And one thing before, because we're, you know, we're coming close to the time I usually have for my podcast. But if we go over that, that's fine. I will do want to say, like, do you encounter a lot of criticism of, like, the particular symbols that were chosen for aUi? Because that, I think, is something that people might, you know, quibble over, over whether these really are the basic concepts. Right.
Yeah. The only corroborating evidence that I can point to is Anna Wierszbicka's NSM, the Natural Semantic Meta-Language. Are you familiar? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You pointed me to it. And I think I had seen it before. Right. And they're... They... that's... their goals are different from aUi. But they are very much along the lines of, you know, finding these... and finding... these semantic primes that are, however, lexically represented in every other language that they studied.
And I think it was about 30 or something. And so, of the current list of the 65... I believe it's 65 NSM primes, 29 correspond directly or are closely related to aUi primes. That's 44%. And of the 42 aUi primes, if you include the numerals, these 29 direct or close NSM primes would amount to 69%. So there is some corroboration there. And these have been studied. And the rest of them, the rest of their... what they're calling primes can be fairly easily formulated with a few symbols in aUi.
So they're... Yeah. So... That's... That's what... Yeah. Yeah. And I... I... You... There... There's definitely a... An attempt at economy that, you know, some people that are looking for semantic primes might... might object to... Because, like, you have... You have a word for good. You don't have a word for bad. I presume that you would just... combine negation with good in order to get the word for bad, right? And similarly, you don't have below. You only have above.
But... I do have... my own skepticism that there even is a universal... set of... of semantic primes. I... That's... That's not to say that we don't have meanings in common as humans across languages. It's just... That... That is definitely a given since we are all human. And so there are certain experiences that we have in common.
But, like, exactly how that is instantiates in different languages and whether semantic primes are, like, an inbuilt thing versus... just, like, something that happened by happenstance is a question. But... it is... it is interesting... it is interesting that... some... some portion of the symbols in aUi are similar to other things that other people have determined to be semantic primes on... based on other research. That is interesting.
And... it... probably goes to... like, the process your father went through and the quality of... of that... that work in actually drilling down and trying to find these basic concepts as... as well as he could. I... I... I view aUi as a very interesting experiment in what language could be. Um... just like a lot of other... sort of experimental... uh... just... just like a lot of other engineered languages that are out there.
Um... whether they... go into... like... class... classification... or... this oligosynthetic route like aUi does... or... um... Toki Pona is... is... is similar... in that it has a very reduced set of lexemes that are used. Um... or... if they just have like radically different ways of forming words and sentences.
Um... I... I... I... I only want to... to poke at things just because I... I... I... I look at the... the website and I see some... some claims that I just want to... I just want to... as... as a linguist... want to like... poke at them. I'm like... Mm... Is this... is this really doing what is... what is being claimed here? Well... and... And... Uh... We... the... uh... our... our process of website is... is... has been kind of a... quite a... quite a process itself. And... and I've...
This is now the third website that... we... And I... the... we are finally back to WordPress site. And... And with the idea that we can, I can now edit that more easily myself. And so I will be making changes on that. Because I mean, I'm learning, you know, I'm, I am learning all the time about what, what is safe to say and what is not. And I mean, it's, it's I, but you know, coming where I come from, it's, it's been a long process to find that objectivity.
And one of the things that, that are, are kind of, that I found interesting from this, Umberto Eco's book here, about the, the idea that they said here, the, the, the, let's see, the above notions. Let's see, let me see here.
The above notions are not irrelevant to our inquiry, because as we shall see many perfect languages, at least the philosophical ones, as quote philosophical, or quote perfect, aspired to such a conformal status, they considered both double articulation and the nonconformal relationship as a source of potential ambiguity, and try to assign a precise content to every sound.
So this, this, this duality of patterning, or double articulation, where you have on one sense, a, on the one side, you have the morphemes, the lexemes and morphemes that are meaningful, but the phonemes are not. And, and so the whole idea of, of making a connection to reality is to bring those, to make a connection with, with reality. Right? And, yeah. So the whole question is, is that something that is of usefulness? Is that, is that something that worth striving for?
And, and it's, it's, it's worth asking the question, I think, my, my own thought is that, I think, my, my own thought is that, human languages evolved the way they did for reasons. That doesn't mean that they're perfect. That doesn't mean that there's not potentially some way to improve upon them. But we have to understand that they evolved in this way because of our history as a species. Because of our history as a species.
And because of our particular instincts and how they build into language, right? So, when we look at... when I look at something like aUi, I'm like, it's definitely worth asking the question whether this could be something better. Whether it is, I still will have some skepticism unless I see, like, you know, people using it and see actual, like, effects from it, right? And, yeah, and I would say, though, that evolution of language is not the same thing as evolution of our biological evolution.
So, I mean, it's not like we're evolving, like, survival of the fittest kind of thing, that if it's more, if you survive, then that language is, therefore, more improved than the language before that or whatever. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if... Those are two types of evolution. I don't... yeah. Well, I would say... so, it is a little complicated because language is also shaped more by social forces than by other things.
I will say that, like, a language that would not be useful for humans to use to communicate would probably not survive. Would not... probably not be passed on. So, there are some things that are similar to biological evolution, but at the same time, there's a lot of external forces on languages that make it... do make it a little bit less survival of the fittest because there's so many effects from politics and... Social dominance and things like that that affect it.
But we're... this... we're coming up on time and it's getting a bit late because of when we had to do this recording, but I will leave it to you, Andrea. Do you have any final thoughts you want to share before we end the show? Can you... can I... Can I still show this... my... the... the word kind of... it's a... it's kind of a word progression. Yeah, sure. Let's... let's... let's go through that quickly. You... yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, here we have i. That's our light symbol.
Can you see the cursor too? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, i and then iv is... is the action ending. So... so, we have light and then iv makes it... it makes it a verb. To shine or to... or light as a... and iOv is a feeling or sense... a sensation. So, when we sense light, iOv, we see, and then tiOv towards seeing might be a word for look... to look and AtiOv... then might be with time. If you spend time looking might be the word for watch. To watch. To watch.
And so you have i, iv, iOv, tiOv, atiOv And viv, you can make it a causative. So to make shine might be, or to make light might be, would be, you know, to turn on the light. viOv, to make see, would be to show. Here, viOv. And here, just another example. So inside, g. And Uv is mind, verb is to think. So gUv is, what's inside the mind is knowledge. And we're, you know, we're talking, we're talking in conceptual and in partly metaphorical sense too.
So gUv, to know, the verb for knowledge, to know. And then etgUV, movement towards knowing, would be to study. And then vetgUv, to make study, is a word for teach. And retgUv, to learn, to study. well is the word for to learn. So there you can, Uv, gUv, etgUv, vetgUv, retgUv So, and I have a lot more examples here of how to make distinctions with, with, you know, with quite, you can, I mean, to me, it is always amazing that you can make quite, quite detailed distinctions.
And just by adding a few symbols. But it, but it is also a, there is a, a, a way of understanding the, the aUi symbols, or the, the, the words, the, the formulations that, that, that is, that does take some learning. And that is based not only on kind of on intuitive logic. But also, on metaphor, and also, there is also some idiomaticity. Right. Is that the word? Right. That's what I am seeing, too, is that you still have to rely on metaphors, especially for more abstract things.
That's how language works. I mean, I don't know that it's that different. It relies on those kinds of languages. Yeah. But it is really interesting, and it is interesting how you could have so few symbols and arrange them into meaningful words. And that, I think, is also going to be useful. Right. I think that's also a reason for conlangers to look at aUi as inspiration, just to, like, have an idea of, like, how much you can get out of this small number of roots. Right.
But, yeah, it's definitely been a pleasure talking to you, Andrea. And I did enjoy our talk. I hope I wasn't too strong on my pushing back on a few things. Well, I thank you for that additional time that I had to prepare, because it's definitely a learning process. I do have to mention my book that is based on aUi. So that is available on the website. It's a novel, and it's based on aUi, and it talks about... it carries the idea of slogans to an extreme, kind of almost a farce.
But it's also... and it's also based on that research, that semantic conditioning research. So I think it's quite... I think it's interesting, so... Well, yeah, you guys... and I can link to that as well, if people want to check out that book. But thank you, Andrea. It's been a pleasure having you on. And it's really great to have someone connected to a language that I'd heard about. I've heard about for decades, right? And have you on and talk a little bit about the philosophy behind it.
But thank you for being on, and thank you, everyone, for listening, and happy conlanging. Thanks so much. Thank you for listening to Conlangery. You can find archives and show notes at conlangery.com. And if you'd like to support the show, the best way to do that is to go to our Patreon. at patreon.com/conlangery. With just a dollar, you can get access to exclusive polls for my Tongues and Runes series. And also, for $5, you can get every podcast episode early and ad-free.
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