Filters on Text and Perception

Many of us are used to having incoming email filtered, decrypted, formatted, and shown in our favorite colors and fonts. These techniques can be taken further. Customization of spelling (e.g., American to British or archaic to modern) would be a straightforward process. Relatively simple conversions could also let you see any text with your favorite date and time formats, use metric or imperial measures, implement obscenity filters, abbreviate or expand acronyms, omit or include technical for...

 Prescriptivism and Descriptivism

So, you seem to be at an impasse. On the one hand, you have generations of grade school English teachers rightly warning their pupils that people might chuckle at them if they use the word ‘irregardless’. On the other hand, you have the scientific rigor of the modern linguistic community touting descriptivism as the torch-bearer of truth and enlightenment. Are you doomed to choose between a democracy of solecisms and a library of thousand-page tomes of writer’s regulations? Are things really ...

 Artificial Languages

Here are six well-known constructed languaiages that can help you think and express yourself in novel ways. Esperanto. Esperanto is the most widely spoken conlang on Earth, with an estimated 2 million speakers, putting it on par with Lithuanian, Icelandic, and Hebrew. 1 It was designed in 1887 by Dr. L.L. Zamenhof as a kind of neutral, universal second language that would allow native speakers of all languages to meet one another on even ground, with none having an intrinsic fluency advanta...

 Lojban for Experimental Linquistics

Lojban is a predicate language, with no distinct nouns, verbs, or adjectives. What are the linguistic (communicative) properties of such a system? The answer has been partially explored through symbolic logic. But do people, when thinking linguistically, mimic in any way the processes of formal logic? What effects would a formal-logic– based language have on those linguistic thinking processes? Is the resulting language susceptible to the same analysis as natural language, in terms of the var...