There are several things I hoped to accomplish with instrumentation.
My personal goals are covered in the "What is
wrong with you?" section that precedes this on the main page
(essentially, I'm trying to get my muse off of my back).
There were several other things that I wanted the language to
accomplish. I don't really know if any of these have been achieved,
but I present them here in hopes of illuminating the ideal towards
which I am attempting to grope.
Instrumentation breaks terms down into basic Types. Ideally, the
meaning of any word would be obvious to someone who had completely
internalized the Types of the
elements of a glyph. The trick, of course, is to completely
align the 'true meaning' of each aspect with its translation into
English (and other languages) while creating the reference vocabulary.
This goal is unaccomplished and possibly unattainable in the
absolute, but I think it is still possible to establish a reasonable
approximation of the 'perfect vocabulary' such that the natural
human proclivity for 'fuzzy logic' will fill in the connotative
blanks amidst the essentially quantum denotations of
Instrumentation.
intuitive
'spelling'
A glyph is 'spelt' by
picking the elements which correspond to its meaning. The syllabary
is regular and invariant. The 128
phonemes are created from an isometric combination of sixteen
consonants and eight vowels. Sound, sight and meaning are
coherent.
This should eliminate the step of associating a meaningless sequence
of letters with meaningless (and sometimes inconstant) sounds to a
'word' which may have multiple unrelated meanings. (meaningful
sounds are things like laughing and crying)
For example, the word 'frog' may refer to an amphibious animal, the
underside of a horse's hoof (to a farrier) or to a type of button
(to a furrier). Furthermore, the meanings of 'frog', 'farrier' and
'furrier' are not obvious from the spellings of the words and vice
versa (although 'furrier' is the least random).
Instrumentation is more regular than natural alphabetic or
ideographic languages (in my unbiased opinion), but I have to admit
that using English as a 'straw man' example is obviously
taking unfair advantage of the opposition. (full disclosure: I can't
spell in English.)
I have thought about dyslexia. The Instrumentation glyph is excessively symmetric. My
(hopeful) solution was to make the 'plug' (the central triangle)
point to the beginning of the glyph. Don't worry about 'left' or
'right', just follow the plug. If anyone knows of a better fix, let
me know.
intuitive syntax
and grammar
This is a hard one.
The adverbial and adjectival degree forms and the plural forms
attempt to match the Types of the Description
layer. Verb conjugation attempts to match the Types of the
Articulation layer and Instrumentation does not require agreement in
number, case, etc. between glyphs within a sentence, but it can't
stop people from using an incorrect tense when describing a
situation.
In sentence construction, Instrumentation attempts to follow a few simple rules
(Subject-Verb-Object with "modifiers follow principals") but there
is no mechanism to automate, obviate or enforce those rules.
intuitive logic
The plan was to take advantage of the (alleged) "natural language"
facility for identifying improper grammar by making logical and mathematical
syntax an integral part of the language. I wanted to make
illogical constructions 'sound wrong'.
This may be possible, but I've concluded that I don't have the
expertise needed to align logical and mathematical operators with
the Types of the Articulation layer such that "provably correct"
functions are intrinsically inherent within the language.
clear
communication
Instrumentation is designed so that two people who speak different languages can converse in real time on-line by having
their own plug-in vocabularies. Standard translation errors (like
misinterpreted homonyms) can be avoided as long as each native
language speaker picks the correct
terms for input.
This would also require the Articulation
layer to contain explicit phrases which would substitute for the
idiomatic constructions of a specific language. "On time", "in
time", "since time", "for time" or "under time" would need to be
rendered unambiguously in every language.
Instant translation is completely possible, but the creation of all
of the plug-in vocabularies is a non-trivial task. Also, the clarity of any conversation between
humans is never guaranteed.
standardized
perception
The Sapir–Whorf
hypothesis states that Elves
don't think like Klingons because they speak different languages.
(No, seriously, that's what it says. The actual hypothesis just uses longer words.)
Instrumentation attempts to exploit the Sapir–Whorf
hypothesis by providing a "a fuzzily isometric codification
of the derivative of function with respect
to being". In other words the language is explicitly based on
a (non-religious) philosophical schema
that can be applied to many facets of life.
I'm not trying to create pod people here, I just want to simplify human-computer interfaces
and other areas that rely on peoples expectations.
This would require a large number of people to become fluent before
it could actually be tested. The design document discusses this here.
universal remote
We have an increasing need to manage the world around us in a
simple, consistent and efficient way. Instrumentation is
attempting to provide a direct ten-finger
to ten-key interface that can be used to 'conjure' useful actions from all the
things that we have the authority to control.
The Specialization layer is divided into 256 Areas. Each Area contains 16.7 million terms related to
tasks and jargon specific to a field of endeavor. Each Area
can contain any words necessary to discuss or manage tasks related
to its field. The difference between describing the features of a
printer or an entertainment system and actually using those
features can now be a matter of intent rather than ability in most
cases.
Instrumentation can be the standard
interface to everything, but this will require consensus
from designers and manufacturers to implement common control
protocols. Market dominance
and consumer
demand are the chicken and egg of positive feedback in the
business world. If either is achieved, the other will follow.
artificial
intelligence
Or at least a data store that
facilitates the type of associative
reasoning required to implement an artificial intelligence.
Instrumentation provides a scheme by which data can be organized
according to its meaning. The design document discusses this here.
Within instrumentation, every term is potentially just one element
change away from thirty-one other terms that have similar meanings.
For example, if we subtract the
'self' element from the word 'agenda', we get the word 'history'.
Both 'agenda' and 'history' relate to thinking about time, but one
is personal and the other is not.
This one is aggressively optimistic even for one of my pipe-dreams. I think the idea has
potential, but it will require a very eloquent and complete
vocabulary in order to fulfill its promise.
conclusion
The unifying theme in these goals is the need for a vocabulary that perfectly
matches the combination of Types (or meanings) that Instrumentation
automatically assigns to each term. This extends beyond linguistic
science and into the realm of art. If constructed properly,
Instrumentation would be more than a language. It would be an eight
and a half billion term poem.