May 20, 2025 • 67 mins
We have a special episode today. Andrea Weilgart, the daughter of W. John Weilgart, the creator of aUi, came on to discuss her father’s language and her work to continue his legacy. aUi website The Ersatz Academy
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(01:00:00):
From this overpowering...
Sense that...
That we grew up with.
That...
You know, that... That aUi ould be thelanguage for peace through understanding.
And... And...
And...
World wars happen every 30 years,my father said.
(01:00:21):
And an average throughout history about...
Every generation there are some kind ofworld wars.
At least I felt it as a child.
Well, not mandate, but at leastpressure to... You know, that...
That if I didn't continue this, it wouldbe... It would be a disaster and so forth.
(01:00:59):
Welcome to Conlangery,the podcast about constructed
languages and thepeople who create them.
I'm George Corley.
And with me in the great state ofWashington is Andrea Weilgard.
And Andrea is the daughter of the creatorof aUi, the language of space.
(01:01:25):
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 withsome trepidation because
I'm thinking of this asmostly a linguistic approach.
(01:01:46):
And so I'm feelinglike I'm not necessarily
have all the necessarybackground, but I'm sure.
I've spent a lot, most of my life or a lotof my life working with aUi.
So that's that's something that hasinterested me for a long time.
(01:02:16):
And I don't know,though, as far as you know,
how it is received inthe linguistic community.
Yes.
Well, I.
When you had someone contacted me and saidyou were interested in coming on,
it was interesting to me because aUi isone of those languages that at least when
(01:02:43):
I started with the conlanging community,it's sort of like it's it's one of those
languages that floats around as like anexample of something unique.
And I thought it would be interesting to.
Hear from someone close to the the creatorand hear a little bit about.
(01:03:06):
About the language to start with.
Can you can you talk tome a little bit about how
you have been involvedwith this language and and.
Apparently sort of continuing on yourfather's legacy and like.
(01:03:29):
How how did that develop?
You did you grow up learning about it orhow did that work?
Well, my sister and Iand mostly I were kind of
co-opted as my father'sguinea pigs and in in.
(01:03:56):
Writing the symbols on the board duringclasses in.
his - some of his seminars on the psychologyof communication at Luther College, and he
would always he at first actually theystarted in our home and it was very
informal and my mother would have dessertat the end and it was just in our small
(01:04:18):
little living room and and we'd be theones writing the symbols on this big huge
heavy slate board slate real true realheavy slate.
And then we'd sometimes play these wordguessing games, which was, you know,
that was that was kind of fun and.
(01:04:39):
And then later it got moved to the collegeas a class up at the college and a seminar
evening seminar and wewere always expected to
go every Monday nightfrom 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 inEnglish manuscripts of a different book
(01:05:08):
actually that never got published but butalso the sequel to the aUi book,
which is the.
Cosmic elements ofmeaning, is it more of a kind
of a philosophy behindthe the symbology and.
So.
We would spend cuz at thattime we didn't have a good
(01:05:31):
enough typewriter so wewe typed we got to use the.
One of the offices IBMtypewriters in the during the
off hours so we'd be upthere in the wee hours of.
Typing and and so anyway,so yeah so and you know,
and I always thought thatthere there it was it was.
(01:05:55):
It always drew me because of the, really thebeauty 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 favoritething to do because it wasn't,
(01:06:19):
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.
(01:06:46):
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 amission.
And so, which I wish and other,other professors at the college,
(01:07:10):
I think, or at least a few have,have said, you know, that it would have
been better if he had done actual researchwith the language.
And, and so that's kind of the directionthat I would
be more interested, although Ialso come from this background of
(01:07:32):
spreading it in, in, in popularizing it.
So I'm kind of in betweenthese two worlds, because it's
not, no, it still doesn't seemto be well known enough.
And, and also, every attempt that we havemade in the past to, to approach
linguists, at least at that time,you know, 20, 30 years ago or more,
(01:07:57):
there wasn't, there wasn't an interest forthat.
And, at all, even back in, even back in20-, 2001, when I went to the LSA
Linguistics Summer Institute onLinguistics or Semantics or whatever it
(01:08:20):
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 thekind of a, maybe a, the final...
(01:08:43):
A relic, right?
Well, yeah, but a final example of thislong, long, centuries long search for a
language that based on semanticprimitives.
And so, but as far as...
taking it seriously from a linguisticstandpoint, you know, either they say it's
too complicated or they say it's toosimplistic.
(01:09:05):
And so, but anyway,but so there's always
been something thathas drawn me back to it.
And so after my fatherpassed away in 1981, I kind of
felt that at some point Iwas going to get back to it.
And I was just waiting for someone to...
(01:09:28):
support me and help me in that endeavor.
And I wish I could have gotten a degree inlinguistics and, but even then at that
time, you know, conlangs were not somethingthat was supported in a research sense.
I think, I think now withinthe last, I don't know, 10 years,
that might've been moresomething that might be possible.
(01:09:51):
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 muchI wanted to talk about conlanging with,
(01:10:16):
with my professors, right?
Because I didn't know what their reactionwould be.
And then something like aUi, seeing how itis.
And it's, that might be even more becauseit is quite a radical experiment.
So, um, if you're on theaudio behind Andrea is, are the,
(01:10:44):
uh, the, the entirety of thesymbols 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 andthe phonemes and the, and each,
(01:11:07):
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 wewould nowadays call an
oligosynthetic language,where it has a very minimal.
(01:11:27):
Set of roots that are combined in order tomake more meanings.
Can you tell me about like, what was,why was choice made to have these very few
primitive roots and like howthat was used to construct
how that is, is used toconstruct larger words?
(01:11:52):
I think my father's ideawas to find concepts.
That all languages andcultures had in common and
the fact that you need inorder to have a language.
You know, with a phoneme assigned to eachmorpheme.
(01:12:18):
Um, there's a certain, there's,of course, a limitation right there.
Because the most common phonemes.
Um, pretty much comprise the, the alphabetas we know it.
Um, and so, uh, unless you get reallycrazy and I mean, uh, no, um, unless you
(01:12:42):
go to more exotic languages, I guess, uh, Idon't know if that's the right term either.
Just, uh, uh, languages that are notfamiliar in the Western world.
Shall we say?
As much.
Uh-huh.
And so, um, so, you know, ideally theywould be fairly easy to pronounce.
(01:13:08):
And, uh, they pretty much are, except forAmericans, the /y/ and the /ø/ are the
ones that, and the /x/ maybe are the onesthat are end up being more difficult.
But, um, so in order to limit it.
Um, by phonemes, you can only have so manymorphemes assigned.
(01:13:32):
And, um, also, so, so, and so the way thathe, 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.
(01:13:54):
He, um, took, uh, he, there was some kindof 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 andsimpler definitions.
And, and then when the definition becamecircular, um, then, you know, then you,
(01:14:20):
you find the most basic ones that aren'tdefined 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, theword that you, that you use to define it.
So, so he, and, and of course,also from his background in philosophy
(01:14:41):
and, um, you know, um, he came to,to posit that these could be.
Potentially universal, or at leastrepresented in other languages in some
(01:15:02):
form, not necessarily, notnecessarily lexemically
represented, but theconcept be represented.
Right.
But that's, that, that's an interestingprocess to go through because like,
uh, just to, to let the audience knowthat, that.
(01:15:22):
Right.
It's, it's sort of getting into acyclical, uh, um, uh, sort of a loop,
uh, in definitions that will happen withany dictionary.
Because we don't, dictionaries can onlydefine words by other words, but in the
real, in reality, the waythat words are defined are
(01:15:45):
based on connecting themto 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 islike the essential meaning
that could be shared by,by different languages.
It's a, it's an interesting thoughtexperiment and it's an interesting experiment.
(01:16:11):
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 becausethere are, and as you said, there wasn't
really research done on it, but therewere, there were claims that made that
(01:16:38):
like it would help defend againstpropaganda in certain ways.
And there were claims made that it wasless arbitrary than natural languages.
And I kind of want to poke at that becausethose are big claims to make.
(01:16:59):
Um, and to me, like first, first of all,looking at the arbitrariness, I would say
that even, even when you'rethinking about trying to make the,
this, the symbols that you haveup are, are trying to be iconic.
But there's still some amount ofarbitrariness to their, their... Yeah.
(01:17:21):
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 likeengineered languages that
make that claim or thatpeople make that claim about.
And I mean, it's hard to see what the,I'm not sure what the evidence is for that.
(01:17:50):
Right.
So can you address those?
Well, okay.
So as far as arbitrariness, you mayultimately, um, language is, okay,
so here's a question.
Is it not possible to have a, isarbitrariness on a, on a scale so that,
(01:18:10):
you know, it's neithera fully non -arbitrary or
it's fully arbitrary sothat, I mean, yes, I think.
If you connect, um, the symbols and soundwith some kind of rationale that relates
it to reality, then is that make it aslightly less or somewhat less arbitrary?
(01:18:36):
I suppose it can.
Like, um, if I, if I looking at yourchart.
So your, um, your symbol for round
Is a good example.
It's like a circle that's inside anothercircle.
I can see that thesymbol, the written simple itself
(01:19:01):
is what we is fairly what we would calliconic.
Iconic means that the, the,the linguistic form is itself
representative of what it meansin the real world in some way.
Right?
Um, and we can.
In, in natural languages, we do findiconicity like this.
(01:19:25):
Uh, we find it in syntax.
We find it, um, uh,where like, um, serial verb
constructions willfollow a temporal order.
That is the same as the temporal orderthat you would have.
You would find in sign languages,actually.
Sign languages seem to have more iconicitythan, uh.
(01:19:47):
Uh, oral languages.
For what reason, it's hardto say, but like, I believe,
like, like, um, likeASL for, uh, milk is this.
Right.
Milking a cow's udders.
Right?
So you can have signs in a language.
(01:20:12):
Um, you can have symbols in, uh,in a language that are.
closer to what itrepresents in the real world.
There's, I, I believe, I, I believe thatthere's always going to be some amount of
jump just because if nothing else you'refiltering through human perception.
(01:20:34):
Yeah.
Um, but there's always going to be somekind 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
(01:20:57):
maybe less arbitrary, at least in thewritten symbols.
In the, the, the sort of the sound tomeaning mapping.
Uh, maybe.
I, I, I, I saw on your site that you haverationales for.
For why the sounds were chosen for themeanings.
(01:21:17):
Mm-hmm.
And that is, that seemslike less of a connection
for a lot of them, butstill 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 ofthe mind.
(01:21:38):
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 andsounds put to it.
And then another person to understand thatand, and how to do that.
(01:22:01):
I mean, how to compared to conventionallanguage.
I mean, it just seems like.
So still quite.
A ways down, uh, away fromrelatively speaking, uh, less
arbitrary than what you wouldfind in conventional language.
(01:22:22):
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.
(01:22:44):
And /b/ is a bilabial stop.
It's, it's easy to seehow the lips are pressed
together and it meanstogether and so forth.
And /k/ is, is articulated in the upperpallet.
Uh, upper velum.
If that's correct.
And /g/ is felt to be more inside.
/g/
(01:23:04):
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.
(01:23:26):
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 pointingout.
(01:23:48):
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.
(01:24:08):
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.
(01:24:28):
They've been reduced quite a bit.
From.
From what maybe an evenmore representative thing would be.
And there are also ones in there.Like, bood is clearly a plus sign.
Negation, probably is derivedfrom a negative sign, right?
So.
(01:24:49):
Because is covers -- itnegates what is below it.
Okay.
But.
It is interesting.
I think I concede that there aresymbols in there that are more iconic
than is typical for words in a language.
(01:25:10):
But.
But, you know, there's stillsome level of arbitrariness.
I do want to say like.
There's also the claims that thislanguage will change the way you think,
And change the way you perceive things.
(01:25:32):
Well, that remains to be...
Yeah.
Tested, I suppose.
I mean... You...
I don't know how much you know how thelanguage came about.
You know, my father's...
His...
He was a young man under Hitler at thetime that Hitler came to power.
(01:25:59):
And he was very...
Realized... I mean...
And experienced the plethora of slogansthat were around at the time that the...
(01:26:20):
What is it?
The Department of Language Manipulationunder Hitler's regime.
They very intentionally used language andslogans to emotionally, you know,
(01:26:45):
reach the masses of people listening tothem 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.
(01:27:08):
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 GregoryRazran.
(01:27:34):
And...
His...
Idea... Of... Who did thisresearch on semantic conditioning.
And...
My father's conclusion... Was...
That... Though...
That the...
Or... His... His... His...
(01:27:55):
Idea was...
That...
Though the conscious mind may think insynonyms, but the...
Subconscious mind may associatein assonance. And...
And I would haveto...
Luria and Vinogradova is the paper here.
(01:28:19):
An objective investigation of the dynamicsof semantic systems.
And... This is in the BritishJournal of Psychology.
It's... It's from 1959.
And... So... What theydid was they... They...
Performed some classical conditioningexperiments on subjects that...
(01:28:43):
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 justa little paragraph here.
Um...
One such method was applied by Schwartz in48, 49.
(01:29:04):
Recording the changein light sensitivity of a
dark-adapted eye resultingfrom a sudden illumination.
Uh...
She then combined thesudden illumination with
the pronouncing by theexperiment of the word...
Doctor... Uh...
Meaning physician.
After a few combinations, this word,which up till then had been neutral,
(01:29:26):
began to provoke a conditioned reflex.
Okay.
So that's... That's aconditioned... Uh... Response.
And...
Lowering the thresholds of lightsensitivity.
But as the experimentshowed, such a lowering
of the thresholds oflight sensitivity was uh...
Objectively provoked by the use of anumber of other equivalent words too.
And a normal adult subject knew such wordsas... These are Russian.
(01:29:52):
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 showedthat words similar in sound, but
pertaining to a differentsense group... Uh...
(01:30:13):
For instance, the word ди́ктор (díktor),which means announcer, did not act as a...
As equivalent stimuli and didnot provoke a corresponding
change in the thresholdsof light sensitivity.
However, if the subject was given theappropriate dose of chloral hydrate and
(01:30:33):
the cortex was put intoinhibitory... an inhibitory
state, the system ofequivalent links changed.
And now, the patient being in a drowsystate, the word díktor, which is similar
in sound, to the key word of dóktor,began to provoke the same conditioned
(01:30:57):
reflex in sensitivity, while thesynonyms...
The synonymous words lékar and vrač losttheir characteristic...
Their character of equivalent stimuli.
Analogous tests have been carried outusing different objective indicators...
With salivary and galvanic skin andvascular reactions and depression of
(01:31:17):
electrical activity of the brain and soforth.
Blood coagulation reactions.
And so, I mean, I do think it's intriguingthat consciously, we over...
I mean, I'm making these conclusions.
(01:31:38):
That consciously, we maybe able to override those
associations that wesubconsciously may tend to make.
Between similar sounds versus similarmeanings.
And so, that the disparity that conventionallanguage has in those two systems
(01:32:05):
He was trying to rectify,I guess, or bring into kind of an
isomorphic harmony so that if it soundssimilar, it also means similar.
Yeah.
Then that is interesting.
So, and I'm not up on the psychologicalresearch.
(01:32:29):
So, I'm not necessarily going... I'm notgoing to attack that result necessarily.
Let's take it as a given that we can havesituations where we associate homophones
versus other cases where we associatesynonyms.
(01:32:54):
That seems to make sense that we can beinfluenced in that way.
How much does aUi really address that?
Because, yes, a similarsound is going to have a
similar meaning, but youalso have a very few phones.
(01:33:17):
Available.
And I think it's worth talking about theway that you build words with this language.
You have to put together a bunch of thesesymbols together and you could end up with
(01:33:37):
pretty similar sounding words that havepretty different meanings still.
Right?
To some extent.
To some extent.
But I don't know.
I know you talked about that and I don'tknow that that's really so much the case.
I mean, certainly not so much the case asyou will find in other-- of a priori
(01:34:04):
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 afew of -- Ygyde
(01:34:25):
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 wholebunch of, of languages and,
and that work that with an effort to makethem have some meaningful relationship
(01:34:49):
that the letters at least are -- have someinnate meaning, but the difference is...
and those words that I've seen,they are very similar.
Oh my gosh.
They would be, it wouldbe very hard to tell them
apart because you'restill only using letters.
(01:35:10):
And, whereas in aUi.
You have the symbol,the morpheme, the iconic symbol attached
to it, which then still makes you be ableto differentiate them quite a bit.
Yeah, that's... well, that is the case,if it's written.
(01:35:33):
When you are... but it is also meant tohave a spoken register with the sounds.
And, you know, one thing I would say isthat, yes, you have all of these concepts
(01:35:53):
that each have a unique sound,right?
However, another part ofthat is that some of the sounds,
depending on your languagebackground, may sound very similar.
/e/ and /i/ can soundvery similar to different people, right?
(01:36:16):
So... and then you are ending up with aconfusion of the movement in light, right?
So, I am interested in all these ideasthat go into this language.
And I think the process that your fatherwent through to choose the symbols that he
(01:36:37):
did and the...
you know, the semantic primitives that hedid is very interesting.
I just... you know, I am just poking atsome of the claims...
Yeah, I understand that.
I mean... Yeah.
...you know... Yeah.
The thing is that even if...
(01:36:58):
even if, you know, /i/ and /iː / if youcan't distinguish that, I mean, they are.
.. you know, aUi... Imean, it doesn't actually have
greatly differentsounds than other languages.
I guess I'm not quite sure, and itdoesn't... I mean, most languages don't
have about this number of phonemes,is that not correct?
(01:37:22):
Well, I'm just... I was just giving anexample.
1Like, /ɛ/ /e/ and /i/ yeah, I was justsaying, yeah, I mean, well, so there are.
..
So the vowel sounds, there's five vowelsand then a length distinction, right?
(01:37:45):
Is that how this...
Yeah, so it's /a aː e eː i iː /and /o oː /.
Yeah.
Popping in with an editor'snote, I said in the podcast
here that aUi has five vowels,and I was mistaken on that.
(01:38:06):
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 justfrom English spelling.
But yeah, those vowels are there in thelanguage.
(01:38:28):
So, I mean, when I say depending on yourlanguage background, okay, five vowels
will work for a lot of human... of a lot oflanguage backgrounds.
But not all languages will have a lengthdistinction.
And some people, that might get lost onthem.
There are a decent number of languagesthat have only three vowels, the /a/,
(01:38:54):
/i/, and /u/, and they mighthave slightly more difficulty
distinguishing like /e/ from/i/ and /o/ from /u/, right?
So, it may depend a little bit on yourlanguage background previously,
(01:39:15):
like how effective it is on the phonologicalside, on the sound side, that separation is.
It is definitely a fascinatingsort of attempt at some
kind of a universal languageor a philosophical language.
(01:39:39):
Yeah.
I don't, you know, I have tried to getaway from the idea
That this is ever going to be spokeninternationally.
I mean, that's not going to happen,certainly not in our lifetime.
I don't know, maybe after the apocalypsewith our current situation here,
(01:40:04):
We might have to have a total renewing ofeverything that has existed so far.
But who knows?
So...
I don't...
That's, you know, that's kind of not whereI'm at.
As you know, any language is going to bedifficult for some people to learn.
(01:40:28):
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 auxiliarylanguage, that's also, you know,
I don't know.
That's...
I'm trying to be realistic.
(01:40:50):
- And...- Yeah.
And so, that's...
You know, I'm more interested in it fromjust 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.
(01:41:10):
They're still sort of in the realm ofsomething that's related.
So, I mean...
...you still, you know, you still haverelationships.
They are still somewhat -- /u/ and /uː /.
I mean, so...
Yeah.
And by the way, if I could share thescreen at some point, not necessarily
right now, I could show how the wordssound and related words sound and...
(01:41:36):
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 slogansdon't cause war.
He said that they possibly cantrigger war because they can
(01:41:58):
focus these tensions andfrustrations of a people that...
At least this was the situation after theFirst World War.
...and focus them on a scapegoat and soforth.
I mean, it's happening now.
(01:42:19):
So...
Yeah.
And I am sympatheticto that in some ways.
I will say, like, slogans can also trigger,like, good actions sometimes, you know?
Right.
Like, in lots of...
(01:42:40):
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 sayabout any conlang is you can only judge it
(01:43:08):
by how effective it is at what it's tryingto do.
Because people come into this,like, art form, science, whatever,
with a whole lot of different aims and awhole lot of different practices.
(01:43:29):
And, you know, most...
What I do is artistic.
I am doing it as an art form.
And I also generally aim tomake... Like, naturalistic languages.
So this is definitelysomething that's way
outside my comfort zoneto be working with, right?
(01:43:53):
But, you know, coming around to looking ataUi, the only way I can judge it is kind
of think of, like, what is it aiming todo?
And it seems to be that it's aiming to...
Change...
(01:44:14):
Change the way people think andcommunicate in certain specific ways.
And I just kind of ask...
And, you know, neitherone of us has, like, much
hard data on, like,how effective it is, right?
And that's one of the things that you wantto do is try to get some research involved
(01:44:34):
to see if it does, like, actually have anyeffect on thinking.
Right?
Yeah.
And I...
And I have some... Some...
Some examples ofthings that... I mean, of...
Just of some connections in...
Or at least projectsin psycholinguistics
(01:44:55):
that would be interestingI 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.
(01:45:16):
That...
That...
That, you know, we needed to...
You know, that... That aUi ould be thelanguage for peace through understanding.
And... And...
And...
World wars happen every 30 years,my father said.
(01:45:39):
And an average throughout history about...
Every generation there are some kind ofworld wars.
And...
And so he wasvery... There was a...
There was a lot of...
At least I felt it as a child.
Well, not mandate, but at leastpressure to... You know, that...
(01:46:01):
That if I didn't continue this, it wouldbe... 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 meso long to come to...
To evolve to a more objective viewpoint ofaUi and to feel like really ideally it
(01:46:27):
should be a subject to some kind ofresearch.
And I'm... What I'm saying there, notonly in this semantic conditioning types of
experiments, which Ihaven't been able to
find anything morerecent in that direction.
- And...- Yeah.
And... But...
But what we do find more recently is thisidea of phonological neighborhood density,
(01:46:50):
and then semantic mapping, you know,mapping versus phonological mapping of
brain mapping of where our sounds areproduced and where the meanings reside.
And...
So that possibly, you know, there could besome research where there...
(01:47:14):
Whether that activation of and location ofphonemes or, well, sounds versus meanings
in the brain, whether if a language likethis might have a difference in that.
(01:47:35):
And I can't... I'm sorry.
I can't explain this to you unless I readit to you.
But there are some papers that I have hereloaded up.
But anyway, so that's where I think it'sreally more...
That's where it's at more for me in arealistic way.
Yeah.
Maybe.
(01:47:56):
Maybe.
Maybe.
Maybe.
Well, I mean, it may be something worthinvestigating.
And one thing before,because we're, you know, we're
coming close to the time Iusually have for my podcast.
But if we go over that, that's fine.
(01:48:19):
I will do want to say, like, do youencounter a lot of criticism of,
like, the particular symbols that werechosen for aUi?
Because that, I think, is something thatpeople might, you know, quibble over,
(01:48:40):
over whether these really are the basicconcepts.
Right.
Yeah.
The only corroborating evidence that Ican point to is Anna Wierszbicka's NSM,
(01:49:03):
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 aredifferent from aUi.
But they are very much along the lines of,you know, finding these...
(01:49:29):
and finding...
these semantic primesthat are, however, lexically
represented in every otherlanguage 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, 29correspond directly or are closely related
(01:49:53):
to aUi primes.
That's 44%.
And of the 42 aUi primes, if you includethe numerals, these 29 direct or close NSM
primes would amount to 69%.
So there is some corroboration there.
(01:50:15):
And these have been studied.
And the rest of them, the rest of their...
what they're calling primes can be fairlyeasily formulated with a few symbols in aUi.
So they're... Yeah.
So...
That's...
(01:50:37):
That's what... Yeah.
Yeah.
And I... I... You...
There...
There's definitely a...
An attempt at economythat, you know, some people
that are looking forsemantic primes might...
might object to...
Because, like, you have...
You have a word for good.
You don't have a word for bad.
(01:50:58):
I presume that you would just...
combine negation with good in order to getthe word for bad, right?
And similarly, you don't have below.
You only have above.
But...
I do have...
(01:51:19):
my own skepticism that there even is auniversal...
set of...
of semantic primes.
I... That's...
That's not to say that we don't have meaningsin common as humans across languages.
It's just...
That...
That is definitely a given since we areall human.
(01:51:42):
And so there are certain experiences thatwe have in common.
But, like, exactly how that isinstantiates in different languages
and whether semantic primes are, like,an inbuilt thing versus...
just, like, something that happened byhappenstance is a question.
(01:52:03):
But...
it is... it is interesting...
it is interesting that...
some...
some portion of the symbols in aUi aresimilar to other things that other people
have determined to be semantic primeson...
based on other research.
That is interesting.
(01:52:24):
And... it... probably goes to...
like, the process your father wentthrough and the quality of... of that...
that work in actually drilling down andtrying to find these basic concepts as...
as well as he could.
I... I...
(01:52:45):
I view aUi as a very interestingexperiment in what language could be.
Um... just likea lot of other...
sort of experimental...
uh... just...
just like a lot of other engineeredlanguages that are out there.
(01:53:08):
Um... whether they...
go into... like... class...
classification...
or... this oligosyntheticroute like aUi does...
or... um...
Toki Pona is... is...
is similar...
in that it has a very reduced set oflexemes that are used.
(01:53:31):
Um...
or... if they just have like radicallydifferent ways of forming words and sentences.
Um...
I... I... I...
I only want to...
to poke at thingsjust because I... I... I...
I look at the... the websiteand I see some...
some claims that I just want to...
(01:53:52):
I just want to... as...
as a linguist... wantto 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...
(01:54:12):
quite a process itself.
And... and I've...
This is now the third websitethat... 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.
(01:54:33):
Because I mean, I'm learning,you know, I'm, I am learning
all the time about what, whatis 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 processto find that objectivity.
(01:54:55):
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 abovenotions.
(01:55:24):
Let's see, let me see here.
The above notions are not irrelevant toour inquiry, because as we shall see many
perfect languages, at least thephilosophical ones, as quote
philosophical, or quote perfect,aspired to such a conformal status,
they considered both double articulationand the nonconformal relationship as a
(01:55:46):
source of potential ambiguity, and try toassign 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
(01:56:09):
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 makea connection with, with reality.
Right?
And, yeah.
So the whole question is, is thatsomething that is of usefulness?
(01:56:37):
Is that, is that something that worthstriving for?
And, and it's, it's, it's worth asking thequestion, I think, my, my own thought is
that, I think, my, my ownthought is that, human
languages evolved theway they did for reasons.
(01:56:58):
That doesn't mean that they're perfect.
That doesn't mean that there's notpotentially some way to improve upon them.
But we have to understandthat they evolved in this way
because ofour history as a species.
(01:57:20):
Because of our history as a species.
And because of our particular instinctsand how they build into language, right?
So, when we look at... when I look atsomething like aUi, I'm like, it's
definitely worth asking the questionwhether this could be something better.
Whether it is, I still will have someskepticism unless I see, like,
(01:57:44):
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 biologicalevolution.
So, I mean, it's not like we're evolving,like, survival of the fittest kind of
(01:58:04):
thing, that if it's more, if you survive,then that language is, therefore,
more improved than the language beforethat 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.
(01:58:25):
Well, I would say... so, it is a littlecomplicated because language is also
shaped more by social forces than by otherthings.
I will say that, like, a languagethat would not be useful
for humans to use to communicatewould probably not survive.
(01:58:49):
Would not... probably not be passed on.
So, there are some things that are similarto biological evolution, but at the same
time, there's a lot of external forces onlanguages that make it... do make it a
little bit less survival of the fittestbecause there's so many effects from
(01:59:15):
politics and...
Social dominance and things like that thataffect it.
But we're... this... we're coming up ontime and it's getting a bit late because
of when we had to do this recording,but I will leave it to you, Andrea.
(01:59:42):
Do you have any final thoughts you want toshare 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 kindof a word progression.
Yeah, sure.
Let's... let's... let's go through thatquickly.
You... yeah.
(02:00:02):
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 actionending.
So... so, we have light and theniv makes it... it makes it a verb.
To shine or to... or light as a... and iOvis a feeling or sense... a sensation.
(02:00:27):
So, when we sense light, iOv, we see, andthen 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 theword for watch.
(02:00:48):
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 makelight might be, would be, you know,
to turn on the light.
(02:01:10):
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 isknowledge.
(02:01:33):
And we're, you know,we're talking, we're talking
in conceptual and in partlymetaphorical sense too.
So gUv, to know, the verb for knowledge,to know.
And then etgUV, movement towards knowing,would be to study.
(02:01:55):
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
(02:02:20):
So, and I have a lot more examples here ofhow 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 detaileddistinctions.
And just by adding a few symbols.
(02:02:41):
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.
(02:03:02):
And that is based not only on kind of onintuitive 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 youstill have to rely on metaphors,
(02:03:28):
especially for more abstract things.
That's how language works.
I mean, I don't know that it's thatdifferent.
It relies on those kinds of languages.
Yeah.
But it is really interesting, and it isinteresting how you could have so few
symbols and arrange them into meaningfulwords.
(02:03:54):
And that, I think, is also going to beuseful.
Right.
I think that's also a reason forconlangers to look at aUi as inspiration,
just to, like, have anidea of, like, how much
you can get out of thissmall number of roots.
(02:04:18):
Right.
But, yeah, it's definitely been a pleasuretalking to you, Andrea.
And I did enjoy our talk.
I hope I wasn't too strong on my pushingback on a few things.
Well, I thank you for thatadditional time that I had
(02:04:40):
to prepare, because it'sdefinitely a learning process.
I do have to mention my book that is basedon 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 afarce.
But it's also... andit's also based on that
(02:05:02):
research, that semanticconditioning research.
So I think it's quite... I think it'sinteresting, so...
Well, yeah, you guys...and I can link to that
as well, if people wantto check out that book.
But thank you, Andrea.
It's been a pleasure having you on.
(02:05:22):
And it's really great to have someoneconnected to a language that I'd heard about.
I've heard about for decades, right?
And have you on and talk a little bitabout the philosophy behind it.
But thank you forbeing on, and thank you,
everyone, for listening,and happy conlanging.
(02:05:47):
Thanks so much.
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From this overpowering...
Sense that...
That we grew up with.
That...
You know, that... That aUi ould be thelanguage for peace through understanding.
And... And...
And...
World wars happen every 30 years,my father said.
(01:00:21):
And an average throughout history about...
Every generation there are some kind ofworld wars.
At least I felt it as a child.
Well, not mandate, but at leastpressure to... You know, that...
That if I didn't continue this, it wouldbe... It would be a disaster and so forth.
(01:00:59):
Welcome to Conlangery,the podcast about constructed
languages and thepeople who create them.
I'm George Corley.
And with me in the great state ofWashington is Andrea Weilgard.
And Andrea is the daughter of the creatorof aUi, the language of space.
(01:01:25):
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 withsome trepidation because
I'm thinking of this asmostly a linguistic approach.
(01:01:46):
And so I'm feelinglike I'm not necessarily
have all the necessarybackground, but I'm sure.
I've spent a lot, most of my life or a lotof my life working with aUi.
So that's that's something that hasinterested me for a long time.
(01:02:16):
And I don't know,though, as far as you know,
how it is received inthe linguistic community.
Yes.
Well, I.
When you had someone contacted me and saidyou were interested in coming on,
it was interesting to me because aUi isone of those languages that at least when
(01:02:43):
I started with the conlanging community,it's sort of like it's it's one of those
languages that floats around as like anexample of something unique.
And I thought it would be interesting to.
Hear from someone close to the the creatorand hear a little bit about.
(01:03:06):
About the language to start with.
Can you can you talk tome a little bit about how
you have been involvedwith this language and and.
Apparently sort of continuing on yourfather's legacy and like.
(01:03:29):
How how did that develop?
You did you grow up learning about it orhow did that work?
Well, my sister and Iand mostly I were kind of
co-opted as my father'sguinea pigs and in in.
(01:03:56):
Writing the symbols on the board duringclasses in.
his - some of his seminars on the psychologyof communication at Luther College, and he
would always he at first actually theystarted in our home and it was very
informal and my mother would have dessertat the end and it was just in our small
(01:04:18):
little living room and and we'd be theones writing the symbols on this big huge
heavy slate board slate real true realheavy slate.
And then we'd sometimes play these wordguessing games, which was, you know,
that was that was kind of fun and.
(01:04:39):
And then later it got moved to the collegeas a class up at the college and a seminar
evening seminar and wewere always expected to
go every Monday nightfrom 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 inEnglish manuscripts of a different book
(01:05:08):
actually that never got published but butalso the sequel to the aUi book,
which is the.
Cosmic elements ofmeaning, is it more of a kind
of a philosophy behindthe the symbology and.
So.
We would spend cuz at thattime we didn't have a good
(01:05:31):
enough typewriter so wewe typed we got to use the.
One of the offices IBMtypewriters in the during the
off hours so we'd be upthere in the wee hours of.
Typing and and so anyway,so yeah so and you know,
and I always thought thatthere there it was it was.
(01:05:55):
It always drew me because of the, really thebeauty 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 favoritething to do because it wasn't,
(01:06:19):
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.
(01:06:46):
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 amission.
And so, which I wish and other,other professors at the college,
(01:07:10):
I think, or at least a few have,have said, you know, that it would have
been better if he had done actual researchwith the language.
And, and so that's kind of the directionthat I would
be more interested, although Ialso come from this background of
(01:07:32):
spreading it in, in, in popularizing it.
So I'm kind of in betweenthese two worlds, because it's
not, no, it still doesn't seemto be well known enough.
And, and also, every attempt that we havemade in the past to, to approach
linguists, at least at that time,you know, 20, 30 years ago or more,
(01:07:57):
there wasn't, there wasn't an interest forthat.
And, at all, even back in, even back in20-, 2001, when I went to the LSA
Linguistics Summer Institute onLinguistics or Semantics or whatever it
(01:08:20):
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 thekind of a, maybe a, the final...
(01:08:43):
A relic, right?
Well, yeah, but a final example of thislong, long, centuries long search for a
language that based on semanticprimitives.
And so, but as far as...
taking it seriously from a linguisticstandpoint, you know, either they say it's
too complicated or they say it's toosimplistic.
(01:09:05):
And so, but anyway,but so there's always
been something thathas drawn me back to it.
And so after my fatherpassed away in 1981, I kind of
felt that at some point Iwas going to get back to it.
And I was just waiting for someone to...
(01:09:28):
support me and help me in that endeavor.
And I wish I could have gotten a degree inlinguistics and, but even then at that
time, you know, conlangs were not somethingthat was supported in a research sense.
I think, I think now withinthe last, I don't know, 10 years,
that might've been moresomething that might be possible.
(01:09:51):
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 muchI wanted to talk about conlanging with,
(01:10:16):
with my professors, right?
Because I didn't know what their reactionwould be.
And then something like aUi, seeing how itis.
And it's, that might be even more becauseit is quite a radical experiment.
So, um, if you're on theaudio behind Andrea is, are the,
(01:10:44):
uh, the, the entirety of thesymbols 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 andthe phonemes and the, and each,
(01:11:07):
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 wewould nowadays call an
oligosynthetic language,where it has a very minimal.
(01:11:27):
Set of roots that are combined in order tomake more meanings.
Can you tell me about like, what was,why was choice made to have these very few
primitive roots and like howthat was used to construct
how that is, is used toconstruct larger words?
(01:11:52):
I think my father's ideawas to find concepts.
That all languages andcultures had in common and
the fact that you need inorder to have a language.
You know, with a phoneme assigned to eachmorpheme.
(01:12:18):
Um, there's a certain, there's,of course, a limitation right there.
Because the most common phonemes.
Um, pretty much comprise the, the alphabetas we know it.
Um, and so, uh, unless you get reallycrazy and I mean, uh, no, um, unless you
(01:12:42):
go to more exotic languages, I guess, uh, Idon't know if that's the right term either.
Just, uh, uh, languages that are notfamiliar in the Western world.
Shall we say?
As much.
Uh-huh.
And so, um, so, you know, ideally theywould be fairly easy to pronounce.
(01:13:08):
And, uh, they pretty much are, except forAmericans, the /y/ and the /ø/ are the
ones that, and the /x/ maybe are the onesthat are end up being more difficult.
But, um, so in order to limit it.
Um, by phonemes, you can only have so manymorphemes assigned.
(01:13:32):
And, um, also, so, so, and so the way thathe, 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.
(01:13:54):
He, um, took, uh, he, there was some kindof 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 andsimpler definitions.
And, and then when the definition becamecircular, um, then, you know, then you,
(01:14:20):
you find the most basic ones that aren'tdefined 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, theword that you, that you use to define it.
So, so he, and, and of course,also from his background in philosophy
(01:14:41):
and, um, you know, um, he came to,to posit that these could be.
Potentially universal, or at leastrepresented in other languages in some
(01:15:02):
form, not necessarily, notnecessarily lexemically
represented, but theconcept be represented.
Right.
But that's, that, that's an interestingprocess to go through because like,
uh, just to, to let the audience knowthat, that.
(01:15:22):
Right.
It's, it's sort of getting into acyclical, uh, um, uh, sort of a loop,
uh, in definitions that will happen withany dictionary.
Because we don't, dictionaries can onlydefine words by other words, but in the
real, in reality, the waythat words are defined are
(01:15:45):
based on connecting themto 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 islike the essential meaning
that could be shared by,by different languages.
It's a, it's an interesting thoughtexperiment and it's an interesting experiment.
(01:16:11):
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 becausethere are, and as you said, there wasn't
really research done on it, but therewere, there were claims that made that
(01:16:38):
like it would help defend againstpropaganda in certain ways.
And there were claims made that it wasless arbitrary than natural languages.
And I kind of want to poke at that becausethose are big claims to make.
(01:16:59):
Um, and to me, like first, first of all,looking at the arbitrariness, I would say
that even, even when you'rethinking about trying to make the,
this, the symbols that you haveup are, are trying to be iconic.
But there's still some amount ofarbitrariness to their, their... Yeah.
(01:17:21):
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 likeengineered languages that
make that claim or thatpeople make that claim about.
And I mean, it's hard to see what the,I'm not sure what the evidence is for that.
(01:17:50):
Right.
So can you address those?
Well, okay.
So as far as arbitrariness, you mayultimately, um, language is, okay,
so here's a question.
Is it not possible to have a, isarbitrariness on a, on a scale so that,
(01:18:10):
you know, it's neithera fully non -arbitrary or
it's fully arbitrary sothat, I mean, yes, I think.
If you connect, um, the symbols and soundwith some kind of rationale that relates
it to reality, then is that make it aslightly less or somewhat less arbitrary?
(01:18:36):
I suppose it can.
Like, um, if I, if I looking at yourchart.
So your, um, your symbol for round
Is a good example.
It's like a circle that's inside anothercircle.
I can see that thesymbol, the written simple itself
(01:19:01):
is what we is fairly what we would calliconic.
Iconic means that the, the,the linguistic form is itself
representative of what it meansin the real world in some way.
Right?
Um, and we can.
In, in natural languages, we do findiconicity like this.
(01:19:25):
Uh, we find it in syntax.
We find it, um, uh,where like, um, serial verb
constructions willfollow a temporal order.
That is the same as the temporal orderthat you would have.
You would find in sign languages,actually.
Sign languages seem to have more iconicitythan, uh.
(01:19:47):
Uh, oral languages.
For what reason, it's hardto say, but like, I believe,
like, like, um, likeASL for, uh, milk is this.
Right.
Milking a cow's udders.
Right?
So you can have signs in a language.
(01:20:12):
Um, you can have symbols in, uh,in a language that are.
closer to what itrepresents in the real world.
There's, I, I believe, I, I believe thatthere's always going to be some amount of
jump just because if nothing else you'refiltering through human perception.
(01:20:34):
Yeah.
Um, but there's always going to be somekind 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
(01:20:57):
maybe less arbitrary, at least in thewritten symbols.
In the, the, the sort of the sound tomeaning mapping.
Uh, maybe.
I, I, I, I saw on your site that you haverationales for.
For why the sounds were chosen for themeanings.
(01:21:17):
Mm-hmm.
And that is, that seemslike less of a connection
for a lot of them, butstill 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 ofthe mind.
(01:21:38):
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 andsounds put to it.
And then another person to understand thatand, and how to do that.
(01:22:01):
I mean, how to compared to conventionallanguage.
I mean, it just seems like.
So still quite.
A ways down, uh, away fromrelatively speaking, uh, less
arbitrary than what you wouldfind in conventional language.
(01:22:22):
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.
(01:22:44):
And /b/ is a bilabial stop.
It's, it's easy to seehow the lips are pressed
together and it meanstogether and so forth.
And /k/ is, is articulated in the upperpallet.
Uh, upper velum.
If that's correct.
And /g/ is felt to be more inside.
/g/
(01:23:04):
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.
(01:23:26):
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 pointingout.
(01:23:48):
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.
(01:24:08):
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.
(01:24:28):
They've been reduced quite a bit.
From.
From what maybe an evenmore representative thing would be.
And there are also ones in there.Like, bood is clearly a plus sign.
Negation, probably is derivedfrom a negative sign, right?
So.
(01:24:49):
Because is covers -- itnegates what is below it.
Okay.
But.
It is interesting.
I think I concede that there aresymbols in there that are more iconic
than is typical for words in a language.
(01:25:10):
But.
But, you know, there's stillsome level of arbitrariness.
I do want to say like.
There's also the claims that thislanguage will change the way you think,
And change the way you perceive things.
(01:25:32):
Well, that remains to be...
Yeah.
Tested, I suppose.
I mean... You...
I don't know how much you know how thelanguage came about.
You know, my father's...
His...
He was a young man under Hitler at thetime that Hitler came to power.
(01:25:59):
And he was very...
Realized... I mean...
And experienced the plethora of slogansthat were around at the time that the...
(01:26:20):
What is it?
The Department of Language Manipulationunder Hitler's regime.
They very intentionally used language andslogans to emotionally, you know,
(01:26:45):
reach the masses of people listening tothem 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.
(01:27:08):
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 GregoryRazran.
(01:27:34):
And...
His...
Idea... Of... Who did thisresearch on semantic conditioning.
And...
My father's conclusion... Was...
That... Though...
That the...
Or... His... His... His...
(01:27:55):
Idea was...
That...
Though the conscious mind may think insynonyms, but the...
Subconscious mind may associatein assonance. And...
And I would haveto...
Luria and Vinogradova is the paper here.
(01:28:19):
An objective investigation of the dynamicsof semantic systems.
And... This is in the BritishJournal of Psychology.
It's... It's from 1959.
And... So... What theydid was they... They...
Performed some classical conditioningexperiments on subjects that...
(01:28:43):
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 justa little paragraph here.
Um...
One such method was applied by Schwartz in48, 49.
(01:29:04):
Recording the changein light sensitivity of a
dark-adapted eye resultingfrom a sudden illumination.
Uh...
She then combined thesudden illumination with
the pronouncing by theexperiment of the word...
Doctor... Uh...
Meaning physician.
After a few combinations, this word,which up till then had been neutral,
(01:29:26):
began to provoke a conditioned reflex.
Okay.
So that's... That's aconditioned... Uh... Response.
And...
Lowering the thresholds of lightsensitivity.
But as the experimentshowed, such a lowering
of the thresholds oflight sensitivity was uh...
Objectively provoked by the use of anumber of other equivalent words too.
And a normal adult subject knew such wordsas... These are Russian.
(01:29:52):
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 showedthat words similar in sound, but
pertaining to a differentsense group... Uh...
(01:30:13):
For instance, the word ди́ктор (díktor),which means announcer, did not act as a...
As equivalent stimuli and didnot provoke a corresponding
change in the thresholdsof light sensitivity.
However, if the subject was given theappropriate dose of chloral hydrate and
(01:30:33):
the cortex was put intoinhibitory... an inhibitory
state, the system ofequivalent links changed.
And now, the patient being in a drowsystate, the word díktor, which is similar
in sound, to the key word of dóktor,began to provoke the same conditioned
(01:30:57):
reflex in sensitivity, while thesynonyms...
The synonymous words lékar and vrač losttheir characteristic...
Their character of equivalent stimuli.
Analogous tests have been carried outusing different objective indicators...
With salivary and galvanic skin andvascular reactions and depression of
(01:31:17):
electrical activity of the brain and soforth.
Blood coagulation reactions.
And so, I mean, I do think it's intriguingthat consciously, we over...
I mean, I'm making these conclusions.
(01:31:38):
That consciously, we maybe able to override those
associations that wesubconsciously may tend to make.
Between similar sounds versus similarmeanings.
And so, that the disparity that conventionallanguage has in those two systems
(01:32:05):
He was trying to rectify,I guess, or bring into kind of an
isomorphic harmony so that if it soundssimilar, it also means similar.
Yeah.
Then that is interesting.
So, and I'm not up on the psychologicalresearch.
(01:32:29):
So, I'm not necessarily going... I'm notgoing to attack that result necessarily.
Let's take it as a given that we can havesituations where we associate homophones
versus other cases where we associatesynonyms.
(01:32:54):
That seems to make sense that we can beinfluenced in that way.
How much does aUi really address that?
Because, yes, a similarsound is going to have a
similar meaning, but youalso have a very few phones.
(01:33:17):
Available.
And I think it's worth talking about theway that you build words with this language.
You have to put together a bunch of thesesymbols together and you could end up with
(01:33:37):
pretty similar sounding words that havepretty different meanings still.
Right?
To some extent.
To some extent.
But I don't know.
I know you talked about that and I don'tknow that that's really so much the case.
I mean, certainly not so much the case asyou will find in other-- of a priori
(01:34:04):
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 afew of -- Ygyde
(01:34:25):
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 wholebunch of, of languages and,
and that work that with an effort to makethem have some meaningful relationship
(01:34:49):
that the letters at least are -- have someinnate meaning, but the difference is...
and those words that I've seen,they are very similar.
Oh my gosh.
They would be, it wouldbe very hard to tell them
apart because you'restill only using letters.
(01:35:10):
And, whereas in aUi.
You have the symbol,the morpheme, the iconic symbol attached
to it, which then still makes you be ableto differentiate them quite a bit.
Yeah, that's... well, that is the case,if it's written.
(01:35:33):
When you are... but it is also meant tohave a spoken register with the sounds.
And, you know, one thing I would say isthat, yes, you have all of these concepts
(01:35:53):
that each have a unique sound,right?
However, another part ofthat is that some of the sounds,
depending on your languagebackground, may sound very similar.
/e/ and /i/ can soundvery similar to different people, right?
(01:36:16):
So... and then you are ending up with aconfusion of the movement in light, right?
So, I am interested in all these ideasthat go into this language.
And I think the process that your fatherwent through to choose the symbols that he
(01:36:37):
did and the...
you know, the semantic primitives that hedid is very interesting.
I just... you know, I am just poking atsome of the claims...
Yeah, I understand that.
I mean... Yeah.
...you know... Yeah.
The thing is that even if...
(01:36:58):
even if, you know, /i/ and /iː / if youcan't distinguish that, I mean, they are.
.. you know, aUi... Imean, it doesn't actually have
greatly differentsounds than other languages.
I guess I'm not quite sure, and itdoesn't... I mean, most languages don't
have about this number of phonemes,is that not correct?
(01:37:22):
Well, I'm just... I was just giving anexample.
1Like, /ɛ/ /e/ and /i/ yeah, I was justsaying, yeah, I mean, well, so there are.
..
So the vowel sounds, there's five vowelsand then a length distinction, right?
(01:37:45):
Is that how this...
Yeah, so it's /a aː e eː i iː /and /o oː /.
Yeah.
Popping in with an editor'snote, I said in the podcast
here that aUi has five vowels,and I was mistaken on that.
(01:38:06):
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 justfrom English spelling.
But yeah, those vowels are there in thelanguage.
(01:38:28):
So, I mean, when I say depending on yourlanguage background, okay, five vowels
will work for a lot of human... of a lot oflanguage backgrounds.
But not all languages will have a lengthdistinction.
And some people, that might get lost onthem.
There are a decent number of languagesthat have only three vowels, the /a/,
(01:38:54):
/i/, and /u/, and they mighthave slightly more difficulty
distinguishing like /e/ from/i/ and /o/ from /u/, right?
So, it may depend a little bit on yourlanguage background previously,
(01:39:15):
like how effective it is on the phonologicalside, on the sound side, that separation is.
It is definitely a fascinatingsort of attempt at some
kind of a universal languageor a philosophical language.
(01:39:39):
Yeah.
I don't, you know, I have tried to getaway from the idea
That this is ever going to be spokeninternationally.
I mean, that's not going to happen,certainly not in our lifetime.
I don't know, maybe after the apocalypsewith our current situation here,
(01:40:04):
We might have to have a total renewing ofeverything that has existed so far.
But who knows?
So...
I don't...
That's, you know, that's kind of not whereI'm at.
As you know, any language is going to bedifficult for some people to learn.
(01:40:28):
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 auxiliarylanguage, that's also, you know,
I don't know.
That's...
I'm trying to be realistic.
(01:40:50):
- And...- Yeah.
And so, that's...
You know, I'm more interested in it fromjust 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.
(01:41:10):
They're still sort of in the realm ofsomething that's related.
So, I mean...
...you still, you know, you still haverelationships.
They are still somewhat -- /u/ and /uː /.
I mean, so...
Yeah.
And by the way, if I could share thescreen at some point, not necessarily
right now, I could show how the wordssound and related words sound and...
(01:41:36):
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 slogansdon't cause war.
He said that they possibly cantrigger war because they can
(01:41:58):
focus these tensions andfrustrations of a people that...
At least this was the situation after theFirst World War.
...and focus them on a scapegoat and soforth.
I mean, it's happening now.
(01:42:19):
So...
Yeah.
And I am sympatheticto that in some ways.
I will say, like, slogans can also trigger,like, good actions sometimes, you know?
Right.
Like, in lots of...
(01:42:40):
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 sayabout any conlang is you can only judge it
(01:43:08):
by how effective it is at what it's tryingto do.
Because people come into this,like, art form, science, whatever,
with a whole lot of different aims and awhole lot of different practices.
(01:43:29):
And, you know, most...
What I do is artistic.
I am doing it as an art form.
And I also generally aim tomake... Like, naturalistic languages.
So this is definitelysomething that's way
outside my comfort zoneto be working with, right?
(01:43:53):
But, you know, coming around to looking ataUi, the only way I can judge it is kind
of think of, like, what is it aiming todo?
And it seems to be that it's aiming to...
Change...
(01:44:14):
Change the way people think andcommunicate in certain specific ways.
And I just kind of ask...
And, you know, neitherone of us has, like, much
hard data on, like,how effective it is, right?
And that's one of the things that you wantto do is try to get some research involved
(01:44:34):
to see if it does, like, actually have anyeffect on thinking.
Right?
Yeah.
And I...
And I have some... Some...
Some examples ofthings that... I mean, of...
Just of some connections in...
Or at least projectsin psycholinguistics
(01:44:55):
that would be interestingI 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.
(01:45:16):
That...
That...
That, you know, we needed to...
You know, that... That aUi ould be thelanguage for peace through understanding.
And... And...
And...
World wars happen every 30 years,my father said.
(01:45:39):
And an average throughout history about...
Every generation there are some kind ofworld wars.
And...
And so he wasvery... There was a...
There was a lot of...
At least I felt it as a child.
Well, not mandate, but at leastpressure to... You know, that...
(01:46:01):
That if I didn't continue this, it wouldbe... 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 meso long to come to...
To evolve to a more objective viewpoint ofaUi and to feel like really ideally it
(01:46:27):
should be a subject to some kind ofresearch.
And I'm... What I'm saying there, notonly in this semantic conditioning types of
experiments, which Ihaven't been able to
find anything morerecent in that direction.
- And...- Yeah.
And... But...
But what we do find more recently is thisidea of phonological neighborhood density,
(01:46:50):
and then semantic mapping, you know,mapping versus phonological mapping of
brain mapping of where our sounds areproduced and where the meanings reside.
And...
So that possibly, you know, there could besome research where there...
(01:47:14):
Whether that activation of and location ofphonemes or, well, sounds versus meanings
in the brain, whether if a language likethis might have a difference in that.
(01:47:35):
And I can't... I'm sorry.
I can't explain this to you unless I readit to you.
But there are some papers that I have hereloaded up.
But anyway, so that's where I think it'sreally more...
That's where it's at more for me in arealistic way.
Yeah.
Maybe.
(01:47:56):
Maybe.
Maybe.
Maybe.
Well, I mean, it may be something worthinvestigating.
And one thing before,because we're, you know, we're
coming close to the time Iusually have for my podcast.
But if we go over that, that's fine.
(01:48:19):
I will do want to say, like, do youencounter a lot of criticism of,
like, the particular symbols that werechosen for aUi?
Because that, I think, is something thatpeople might, you know, quibble over,
(01:48:40):
over whether these really are the basicconcepts.
Right.
Yeah.
The only corroborating evidence that Ican point to is Anna Wierszbicka's NSM,
(01:49:03):
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 aredifferent from aUi.
But they are very much along the lines of,you know, finding these...
(01:49:29):
and finding...
these semantic primesthat are, however, lexically
represented in every otherlanguage 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, 29correspond directly or are closely related
(01:49:53):
to aUi primes.
That's 44%.
And of the 42 aUi primes, if you includethe numerals, these 29 direct or close NSM
primes would amount to 69%.
So there is some corroboration there.
(01:50:15):
And these have been studied.
And the rest of them, the rest of their...
what they're calling primes can be fairlyeasily formulated with a few symbols in aUi.
So they're... Yeah.
So...
That's...
(01:50:37):
That's what... Yeah.
Yeah.
And I... I... You...
There...
There's definitely a...
An attempt at economythat, you know, some people
that are looking forsemantic primes might...
might object to...
Because, like, you have...
You have a word for good.
You don't have a word for bad.
(01:50:58):
I presume that you would just...
combine negation with good in order to getthe word for bad, right?
And similarly, you don't have below.
You only have above.
But...
I do have...
(01:51:19):
my own skepticism that there even is auniversal...
set of...
of semantic primes.
I... That's...
That's not to say that we don't have meaningsin common as humans across languages.
It's just...
That...
That is definitely a given since we areall human.
(01:51:42):
And so there are certain experiences thatwe have in common.
But, like, exactly how that isinstantiates in different languages
and whether semantic primes are, like,an inbuilt thing versus...
just, like, something that happened byhappenstance is a question.
(01:52:03):
But...
it is... it is interesting...
it is interesting that...
some...
some portion of the symbols in aUi aresimilar to other things that other people
have determined to be semantic primeson...
based on other research.
That is interesting.
(01:52:24):
And... it... probably goes to...
like, the process your father wentthrough and the quality of... of that...
that work in actually drilling down andtrying to find these basic concepts as...
as well as he could.
I... I...
(01:52:45):
I view aUi as a very interestingexperiment in what language could be.
Um... just likea lot of other...
sort of experimental...
uh... just...
just like a lot of other engineeredlanguages that are out there.
(01:53:08):
Um... whether they...
go into... like... class...
classification...
or... this oligosyntheticroute like aUi does...
or... um...
Toki Pona is... is...
is similar...
in that it has a very reduced set oflexemes that are used.
(01:53:31):
Um...
or... if they just have like radicallydifferent ways of forming words and sentences.
Um...
I... I... I...
I only want to...
to poke at thingsjust because I... I... I...
I look at the... the websiteand I see some...
some claims that I just want to...
(01:53:52):
I just want to... as...
as a linguist... wantto 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...
(01:54:12):
quite a process itself.
And... and I've...
This is now the third websitethat... 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.
(01:54:33):
Because I mean, I'm learning,you know, I'm, I am learning
all the time about what, whatis 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 processto find that objectivity.
(01:54:55):
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 abovenotions.
(01:55:24):
Let's see, let me see here.
The above notions are not irrelevant toour inquiry, because as we shall see many
perfect languages, at least thephilosophical ones, as quote
philosophical, or quote perfect,aspired to such a conformal status,
they considered both double articulationand the nonconformal relationship as a
(01:55:46):
source of potential ambiguity, and try toassign 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
(01:56:09):
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 makea connection with, with reality.
Right?
And, yeah.
So the whole question is, is thatsomething that is of usefulness?
(01:56:37):
Is that, is that something that worthstriving for?
And, and it's, it's, it's worth asking thequestion, I think, my, my own thought is
that, I think, my, my ownthought is that, human
languages evolved theway they did for reasons.
(01:56:58):
That doesn't mean that they're perfect.
That doesn't mean that there's notpotentially some way to improve upon them.
But we have to understandthat they evolved in this way
because ofour history as a species.
(01:57:20):
Because of our history as a species.
And because of our particular instinctsand how they build into language, right?
So, when we look at... when I look atsomething like aUi, I'm like, it's
definitely worth asking the questionwhether this could be something better.
Whether it is, I still will have someskepticism unless I see, like,
(01:57:44):
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 biologicalevolution.
So, I mean, it's not like we're evolving,like, survival of the fittest kind of
(01:58:04):
thing, that if it's more, if you survive,then that language is, therefore,
more improved than the language beforethat 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.
(01:58:25):
Well, I would say... so, it is a littlecomplicated because language is also
shaped more by social forces than by otherthings.
I will say that, like, a languagethat would not be useful
for humans to use to communicatewould probably not survive.
(01:58:49):
Would not... probably not be passed on.
So, there are some things that are similarto biological evolution, but at the same
time, there's a lot of external forces onlanguages that make it... do make it a
little bit less survival of the fittestbecause there's so many effects from
(01:59:15):
politics and...
Social dominance and things like that thataffect it.
But we're... this... we're coming up ontime and it's getting a bit late because
of when we had to do this recording,but I will leave it to you, Andrea.
(01:59:42):
Do you have any final thoughts you want toshare 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 kindof a word progression.
Yeah, sure.
Let's... let's... let's go through thatquickly.
You... yeah.
(02:00:02):
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 actionending.
So... so, we have light and theniv makes it... it makes it a verb.
To shine or to... or light as a... and iOvis a feeling or sense... a sensation.
(02:00:27):
So, when we sense light, iOv, we see, andthen 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 theword for watch.
(02:00:48):
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 makelight might be, would be, you know,
to turn on the light.
(02:01:10):
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 isknowledge.
(02:01:33):
And we're, you know,we're talking, we're talking
in conceptual and in partlymetaphorical sense too.
So gUv, to know, the verb for knowledge,to know.
And then etgUV, movement towards knowing,would be to study.
(02:01:55):
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
(02:02:20):
So, and I have a lot more examples here ofhow 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 detaileddistinctions.
And just by adding a few symbols.
(02:02:41):
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.
(02:03:02):
And that is based not only on kind of onintuitive 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 youstill have to rely on metaphors,
(02:03:28):
especially for more abstract things.
That's how language works.
I mean, I don't know that it's thatdifferent.
It relies on those kinds of languages.
Yeah.
But it is really interesting, and it isinteresting how you could have so few
symbols and arrange them into meaningfulwords.
(02:03:54):
And that, I think, is also going to beuseful.
Right.
I think that's also a reason forconlangers to look at aUi as inspiration,
just to, like, have anidea of, like, how much
you can get out of thissmall number of roots.
(02:04:18):
Right.
But, yeah, it's definitely been a pleasuretalking to you, Andrea.
And I did enjoy our talk.
I hope I wasn't too strong on my pushingback on a few things.
Well, I thank you for thatadditional time that I had
(02:04:40):
to prepare, because it'sdefinitely a learning process.
I do have to mention my book that is basedon 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 afarce.
But it's also... andit's also based on that
(02:05:02):
research, that semanticconditioning research.
So I think it's quite... I think it'sinteresting, so...
Well, yeah, you guys...and I can link to that
as well, if people wantto check out that book.
But thank you, Andrea.
It's been a pleasure having you on.
(02:05:22):
And it's really great to have someoneconnected to a language that I'd heard about.
I've heard about for decades, right?
And have you on and talk a little bitabout the philosophy behind it.
But thank you forbeing on, and thank you,
everyone, for listening,and happy conlanging.
(02:05:47):
Thanks so much.
Thank you for listening to Conlangery.
You can find archives and show notes atconlangery.com.
And if you'd like tosupport the show, the
best way to do thatis to go to our Patreon.
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(02:06:08):
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(02:06:56):
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