To Azardad
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IamLEAM1983
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To Azardad
You've been forced to familiarize yourself with coding methods and languages, as part of your designing the Lexicon. How was that useful?
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IamLEAM1983
- Site Admin
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As Azardad
"Language is a mutable construct by its very nature. If the whole world operated under a single lingua franca, random and deterministic systems like culture couldn't have emerged in the same way they did. Order basically is as complex as Chaos itself, when applied to the construction of something as limited, and yet as powerful as a language. Consider Tolkien's Sindarin and Quenya, consider Paul Frohmer's work on the Na'vi idiom. In both cases, a basic framework was given and the fans had to polish the grammar, to derive some sort of sense out of the handful of sentences the books and movies offered, and to apply this basic purpose to the entirety of both languages. There were debates, disagreements, tiffs over the intrinsic meaning of a few generally meaningless concepts...
The short of it is that Language as understood by surface-dwellers is a surface-dweller concept at its finest. Order out of Chaos, essentially, or Chaos reined into an exquisitely productive form. Sounds omitted or arbitrarily deemed to be meaningless in one language, these same phonemes being selected in another... As amazed as I've always been by linguistics, this wasn't something I could base the Lexicon on. It needed a solid interface, a rigid filter of unchanging Order that would allow for the Chaos it could process to be processed by the host's brain.
I found what I was looking for in the late sixties, during FORTRAN's heyday. I'd just made it to the surface and managed to acquire a workstation. I had to learn how to program my machine to begin the crude task of sketching out genetic algorithms that would later be used as templates for the Lexicon's creation. Working with FORTRAN, COBOL - and the later decades' C++ and even the fairly exotic ones such as Python - I managed to understand where the core of pure, unchanging and unfeeling Sense I needed to find waited, in the throng of mutable concepts speech has always offered. Either/Or gates, If and And. Yes and No.
I'd found the absolutes the Black Speech never developed; the set of flipping coins that's intrinsic to surface-dweller speech, as difficult to understand to me, initially, as Black Speech would be to you. I had to find a way to code the pure Determinism of the Black Speech into absolutes. The second epiphany I needed occurred when I realized that close to ninety percent of your average Black Speech formulations aren't anything more than junk data; outright harmful constructions design to push Sense away as much as possible. From a native point of view, these are essential to me. From your point of view, they were useless.
I had to coach my implanted subjects in the art of selective negation. Once I found the right way to coach the Lexicon on how to do this, the wind was in my sails."
The short of it is that Language as understood by surface-dwellers is a surface-dweller concept at its finest. Order out of Chaos, essentially, or Chaos reined into an exquisitely productive form. Sounds omitted or arbitrarily deemed to be meaningless in one language, these same phonemes being selected in another... As amazed as I've always been by linguistics, this wasn't something I could base the Lexicon on. It needed a solid interface, a rigid filter of unchanging Order that would allow for the Chaos it could process to be processed by the host's brain.
I found what I was looking for in the late sixties, during FORTRAN's heyday. I'd just made it to the surface and managed to acquire a workstation. I had to learn how to program my machine to begin the crude task of sketching out genetic algorithms that would later be used as templates for the Lexicon's creation. Working with FORTRAN, COBOL - and the later decades' C++ and even the fairly exotic ones such as Python - I managed to understand where the core of pure, unchanging and unfeeling Sense I needed to find waited, in the throng of mutable concepts speech has always offered. Either/Or gates, If and And. Yes and No.
I'd found the absolutes the Black Speech never developed; the set of flipping coins that's intrinsic to surface-dweller speech, as difficult to understand to me, initially, as Black Speech would be to you. I had to find a way to code the pure Determinism of the Black Speech into absolutes. The second epiphany I needed occurred when I realized that close to ninety percent of your average Black Speech formulations aren't anything more than junk data; outright harmful constructions design to push Sense away as much as possible. From a native point of view, these are essential to me. From your point of view, they were useless.
I had to coach my implanted subjects in the art of selective negation. Once I found the right way to coach the Lexicon on how to do this, the wind was in my sails."
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IamLEAM1983
- Site Admin
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- Joined: Tue Jan 08, 2013 4:54 am
- Location: Quebec, Canada
To Azardad
So you're saying the Black Speech has nothing set in stone within itself? No Yes or No?
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IamLEAM1983
- Site Admin
- Posts: 3710
- Joined: Tue Jan 08, 2013 4:54 am
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As Azardad
"Exactly.
In English, this response requires a specific set of words to articulate the precise intent of this current form of communication. To broadcast the previous sentence, the exact same words must be used. If I swapped words around for others without care for grammar, I'd create gibberish.
In Dalarath, there is no such thing as gibberish, quite simply. Every sound, every construct, every scream, every bellow, every burp or popping sound carries with it some amount of sense, the whole of it all frequently contradicting itself. The Black Speech creates harmful nonsense out of a deluge of sense, with only the especially constructed minds of us Void Weavers being normally capable of deriving any sort of communication out of it all. Add to it the fact that so much of what we spew is sound-based hate and malicious intent that manifests on a physical level as the destabilization of the listener's cognitive skills.
The Lexicon is the key, and any sentence I could speak in my native tongue would be a compatible lock. By interfacing the Lexicon with selected axon-dendrite combos in the Wernicke and Broca areas of the brain, I'm able to force the Black Speech to emerge as intelligible words spoken in the implanted subject's favoured language. In Aidan and Charles' case, this would be English."
In English, this response requires a specific set of words to articulate the precise intent of this current form of communication. To broadcast the previous sentence, the exact same words must be used. If I swapped words around for others without care for grammar, I'd create gibberish.
In Dalarath, there is no such thing as gibberish, quite simply. Every sound, every construct, every scream, every bellow, every burp or popping sound carries with it some amount of sense, the whole of it all frequently contradicting itself. The Black Speech creates harmful nonsense out of a deluge of sense, with only the especially constructed minds of us Void Weavers being normally capable of deriving any sort of communication out of it all. Add to it the fact that so much of what we spew is sound-based hate and malicious intent that manifests on a physical level as the destabilization of the listener's cognitive skills.
The Lexicon is the key, and any sentence I could speak in my native tongue would be a compatible lock. By interfacing the Lexicon with selected axon-dendrite combos in the Wernicke and Broca areas of the brain, I'm able to force the Black Speech to emerge as intelligible words spoken in the implanted subject's favoured language. In Aidan and Charles' case, this would be English."