Language

What do the following words have in common?

photo, photography, photographic, photographer, camera, selfie, snapshot, ...

Something to do with capturing pictures. Something to do with detecting photons and noting their positions. Something to do with an art, or a science, or a process, or a technology, perhaps. Or maybe something about recording events, or preserving memories.

When you hear one of those words, some or all of those ideas probably appear in your mind. And yet, you probably wouldn't say that any of those words mean that web of ideas. Each of them is connected, yet none of them is the one that contains all that meaning.

What would a language be like, if instead of defining all the possible meanings for a word, we instead agreed on the general idea of what it represents. For the sake of argument, let's invent the word fot', and say that it is the name for the general idea of photography.

How should we go about using this word? By itself, it is inconvenient, as it contains no grammatical information. We can use it to conjure a set of ideas, but we can't combine it with other words to clarify our intent.

We could have a set of markers that go on the end a word to say how it relates to the other words in a sentence. Perhaps we will say that adjectives end in a, and nouns end in o. If we invent another word bild', which means something about pictures, we can combine our words:

fota bildo

Now we've taken the idea of bild' and made it into a noun, and we've added an adjective that is about fot'. We know that an adjective is for describing a noun, so we're combining an object that is related to bild', with a description that is about fot'. We've described a photographic picture.

What else can we do with our general words? We'll need to have verbs, so we can make full sentences. Perhaps we can say that present tense verbs end with as. If hom' were a word that means something about people, then we could say:

homo fotas per fotilo

I haven't said yet what that verb means, but do I need to? It's the verb that is most associated with the idea of fot'. I think that means "to take a photograph". Maybe you don't agree, in which case I've not managed to communicate well with you, but I suspect you agree. If I wasn't sure, I would want to add some more information to my sentence.

I also added some more words there: il' is a tool. Fotilo is therefore a tool for taking a photo. Probably in english we would use the word camera, if we knew that word.

We could also think about using our word fot' as a noun:

foto

What's the noun that is most associated with fot', I wonder. And I'm not sure. It could be the process or practice of photography, or the general results of the process (also "photography" in english), or it could be an individual photograph. I think if I were to just use that word without context, it would be confusing. Let's introduce some new words: ad' will mean a process, while aĵ' will mean a thing.

fotado kreas fotaĵon

I secretly invented the word kre' there, I hope it's clear that kre' is about creating. I also added an n to the end of the object noun, just to make it clear which noun is the subject, and which is the object. Now probably you can understand that photography (a process) makes a photograph (a thing). If I said:

mi havas foton

Then I don't think I need to clarify. I have a photo (a thing). I don't think there's too much chance of that being misunderstood, so I could probably leave it like that. Maybe I want to add that this is a photo that contains a picture:

mi havas bildan foton

We have the idea of a picture, we want to use that to describe a photo. So we just did it.

While we're talking about fot', maybe we could be more technical, and talk about:

fota scienco

Or maybe we aren't interested in the science, we just want to talk about the art:

fota arto

We can now talk about anything we like, and say how it relates to fot'. We still don't know exactly what that word means, in the sense that we didn't give it a precise definition, but that's probably a good thing.

If you were to look up in an english dictionary all those words we saw at the top, you would have a whole lot of definitions, all roughly about the ideas we discussed here. When you heard or read one of those words, how would you know which meaning was intended?

From the context, is of course the answer. The words we use don't fully define anything on their own, what matters is the ideas they are connected to in our minds, and the context they are used in.

In order to combine words, we need a form of grammar, so that we can have a shared idea of how words can be used together. The job of a language is to allow us to take the ideas in our minds, translate them into grammatical sentences, and present them to others.

A good language would be one that made that process as simple as possible, allowing us to select words that relate to our thoughts, and easily fit them into a grammar that we all can understand.

Time and effort spent thinking about how to use irregular grammars or haphazard vocabularies is wasted, if our intent is just to communicate. The pain of learning those irregularities is cruely placed on those who those whose native language is not widespread. Enormous dictionaries with subtle definitions are a burden on all of us who need to communicate, but haven't the time to learn the intricacies of specific local or legal or official vocabularies.

People from different cultures and backgrounds need to work together, and they need a language to do that. Why would anyone suggest a language that causes confusion, or exasperation, or outright pain, to so many people? Surely we must choose a language that allows people to easily express their thoughts, and to be understood.

All the words and grammar I "invented" here are valid Esperanto, naturally.