Aspies For Freedom

I don't think that the earlier motive for autlang would have worked; because of the problems that I talk about in my other thread, and on whether any language could make non-verbal autistics talk (if they can communicate by other means, then what's the point?). So, here's a new thought:

The Chinese made advancements in chemistry and agriculture that Europe wouldn't make until the eighteenth century. Though there are most likely many factors part of there success was in the language. The Chinese understood that there were two elements to many things, they called them yin and yang. Even if the idea was made esoteric at times it was at the core of Chinese science for hundreds of years. Other examples include the switch from Roman to Arabic numerals (the concept of zero alone changed math forever), and the scientific method.

Language defines how we think about things. If there was no word for round then imagine how different the world would be. If start a new language it should be made for changing how we think about things both practically and artistically.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_Hypothesis

Basically, this is what I was thinking of.

Any real evidence for this claim or merely idle speculation and wishful thinking?

You seem to be claiming that the Chinese invented the scientific method.  Let's see the evidence to back up this claim.  Let's see the evidence to confirm the claim the Chinese language is uniquely suited for utilizing the scientific method.

Language is MORE THAN JUST A LIST OF WORDS!!!!!  IT IS POSSIBLE TO EXPRESS A CONCEPT IN A LANGUAGE WITHOUT REQUIRING IT TO BE A SINGLE WORD?

Just how much linguistics and semantics have you actually studied?  ALL languages use circumlocutions.

Excuse me, but are capitals really needed? It seems like you are shouting.

The Chinese didn't have a scientific method (at that time), and the scientific method has exceeded early Chinese philosophy. But at the time the idea of yin and yang was far better than random speculation. It was a sort of theory of every thing for them.

You might be right for my example of round for others it's very hard to find substitutes. One of my ideas for words includes a set of words that talks about complexity and simplicity in a system. Thought you could make longer substitutes for such words, just the fact that there are such words changes things because they gain more usage.

In any event, WE SHOULD TEST SUCH IDEAS TO PROVE OR DISPROVE THEM, WITHOUT ILLOGICAL USE OF THE CAP LOCK BUTTON!!!!!

^ Though.

Just a note--if you want to emphasize something, it's better to use bold or italic text. To do that, you surround the text with  tags. [ i ] text [ / i ] for italic, and [ b ] text [ / b ] for bold. Remove the spaces in the tags.

Blah blah blah.

A lot of ancient cultures had a "theory of everything".  Our science owes as much to the Greeks as to the Chinese, probably more, since Greek metaphysics didn't become as mystically bound as Chinese.  It was a Greek who came up with the theoretical underpinnings for atoms, for example.

Alternatively, it means that ideas become grossly subject to misinterpretation because they become over-summarized into a single word.  This leads to greater and greater lack of progress.  Consider the word "theory".  Imagine if we did not have that word.  This would be a great improvement in public debate over science.

Currently, many English speakers ignorantly dismiss inconvenient scientific principles because they are "just theories".  Now, what if that word didn't exist and instead in the sciences, the circumlocution of "tested hypotheses that conceptually work together and are currently confirmed by data and consensus of the scientific community" were used every time?

Well, there are scientific laws. But there are also many theories and all that further studies do is either confirm or fail to confirm the theories. So, I don't think there is too much use of the word "theory". I would also question if the "consensus" of the scientific community always means that a particular idea is correct.

For example, there are different scientific communities.

One of the most telling examples of where "consensus" leads to a very incorrect conclusion is where it was believed for many years that the Earth was flat. If it weren't for somebody contradicting that consensus, we would still be believing that false idea to this very day.

In science, theory really needs to be replaced with the word model.

Perhaps instead of a language, some sort of method of analyzing and comparing different fields of study would work better.

I think a language probably reflects the way the culture that uses it thinks, rather than determining it. So I like the idea of an autlang that has words for useful concepts that we have, but there's no word for in English or other languages. But I kind of doubt that the ways our concepts differ from NT ones are similar enough between different aspies/autistics to be fit easily into one language.

But if we could come up with a world language (not necessarily specifically for autistics) that was regular like other artificial languages and wasn't biased towards any pre-existing language, and actually use it for communicating with each other, we'd have done something that as far as I know no-one's done before.