[saizai]

FWIW, we deliberately decided to have no phonetic representation at all, to avoid any linearizing influence.

Yes, it would need a large number of glyphs. Not so many as speculated above, though — e.g. we have one glyph that covers communicate, say, tell, hear, speech (all senses), etc. (with some mix-ins for sensory modality); another one that covers give, receive, gift, sell, etc.

Linear languages with European structure need way more words, because the syntax isn't very able to represent the shared concept between these with a single word. We can.

And yes, common structures do get turned into glyphs, or reduced forms.

We also have a barely-explored concept about glyphs being fractal (i.e. if you zoom in, it's actually the shape of an underlying utterance whose syntax "draws" the higher order glyph). This presumably would be a sort of literary or poetic form. (I have composed one very simple example.¹)

¹ https://s.ai/poetry/distant_love

[andrewflnr]

Re phonetics, this may not be your goal but I was thinking about it from the standpoint of potential wide-scale usage. In that scenario, you would want phonetics for handling foreign words, or for literally discussing phonetics if nothing else. I didn't see on the page how you handle narrative, but I can imagine handing phonetic descriptions the same way. Maybe "forward" goes in a circular pattern rather than "linear"? You already have sequences like that in the distributive construct.

[saizai]

We have absolutely no interest in wide-scale usage, let alone if it were to come at the expense of fully exploring what a natively-2D language is like.

Narrative is an utterly different thing in UNLWS. We simply do not have "stories" in the same sense as you're used to. The closest so far is that, rather than the reward/punchline/moral/etc coming from the ordering of things, it comes from understanding the whole, i.e. as an emergent effect of the gestalt.

We don't try to have things that aren't native to 2D. We are, if necessary, able to describe something that happens on a linear timeline - that's pretty easy actually - but it simply isn't the "normal" way to arrange a large utterance. We just aren't all that interested in temporal order. We'd be more likely to represent the underlying structural order, or causality networks.

We do have a quotative, and we've talked about using IPA if we ever needed to literally refer to phonetics for some reason, but so far we simply haven't needed or wanted to do so. (Not for names, either. Names are assigned in a manner that's native to UNLWS; we don't care at all about the phonetic form in another language. Consider ASL, which does this partially [for people who do have sign-names, and under extremely heavy contact with English as a dominant language].)

We never borrow foreign words phonetically. That is just as alien to UNLWS as assigning Chinese hanzi to a name based on their meanings or stroke #s would be to an English-only speaker. We only borrow concepts, and that's only after (sometimes radically) rethinking what those concepts actually are, underlyingly, and what an UNLWS-native perspective of them would entail.

We want to explore two-dimensional language in its own right. Although we do care about expressive power, we really don't care whether it's easily translatable to/from any other languages.

[plutonorm]

I love this idea so much that I would like to learn the language. Is there a group or something I could join? Does anyone want to make a group? I'm sure we could work something out with an online drawing app.

The possiblity of getting ideas out of my head and onto paper without having to linearise everything is very exciting.

[saizai]

There is now: https://join.slack.com/t/ulws/shared_invite/zt-ewevpfmf-s1r3...

[uryga]

i'd love a group like that!