I was cleaning off my desk and I found a couple of projects that have sat idle for so long that I’m going to shelve them indefinitely. They are two languages I was inventing to help make the world a better place.
The first language, and the one with the most practical real-world application, is called Mover’s Tongue. It’s a system of syntax and terminology to facilitate the precise communication between two people moving a heavy article of furniture.
I think about this every time I help people move, because there’s always some point in the process when you have to set the sofa on a diagonal and jimmy the arm up around the edge of a doorframe. Mover’s Tongue would describe that process in a short sentence.
Here’s some of the features of mover’s tongue:
-Two separate naming schemes for the direction of movement and orientation of an object. One that is subjective to the speakers or listener, and one that keeps a fixed frame on the object being moved.
-Words for arcane movements that can be linked into a sequential string of actions.
-A large vocabulary of safety-terms and contingencies.
At this point to do the language right, I would need to work for a summer as a professional mover and then compile the real-world testing into a handbook or a wiki.
The other language has few if any real-world applications. In fact it is almost entirely useless, and deliberately so. It is a graphical Inferno/Krusher dialect called Boomspeak.
Boomspeak works as a series of non-sequential, linked word balloons. The language has no nouns, just action verbs and adjectives (although the adjectives can be linked in word-balloon clusters to form specific object descriptors). I like the idea of a language that doesn’t have a linear written progression, just a two-dimensional array of symbolic relations. Of course doing it that way probably wouldn’t make any sense.
I can imagine someday doing a short comic that uses this language. It would work well once I convert all the vocabulary to Inkscape graphics. But at the moment the Inferno/Krusher sub-genre is on the wain, and I don’t have time for a lot of cartooning, so it’s all going into the files for a rainy day.
