Goolang (ideas about custom conlang)

Adrijaned

Administrator
Contributor
Following the discussions on chat about conlang, here are some of my thoughts about one that would suit well the gooblocks (see https://forum.terasology.org/threads/about-goo.2190/ for all kinds of details about gooblocks)
As Goolang isn't anything but a mere transcript of gooblock's telephatic communication, and is used mainly for archivation purposes by gooblock's elders, the language doesn't have to read very nicely or be much complicated. That means only simple sentences with single subject and object, in this order. Each subject and object can also be prepended by some qualities (read: adjectives). Example: "Pink traveller gooblock high {on stone} jumps" ("on stone" is a single quality) (please note the sentence differs from "Pink traveller gooblock {on high stone} jumps"). Subject or object of the sentence (only one) could also be replaced by one of few special words, resembling english or, and etc. When replacing subject, the word would put the object into corresponding relevance to the object of previous sentence. When replacing object, it would be similar except mirrored. Examples: "Gooblock jump. Or slide." translates to "Gooblock jumps or slides."; "Traveller gooblock jump. Elder gooblock and." translates to "Traveller gooblock and elder gooblock jump". When there would be some more complex qualities (like the earlier example "on high stone"), there would always be one main quality (in this case"on" as a quality of place), and other sub-qualities would again be prefixed to it, possibly with some special binding words again, thought only for the current level of sub-quality(or, and etc.) (the example would then become "high and stone block on". You couldn't however write "{very high} and {dark stone} block on", only possibly "very high and stone block on" - the non-possible case would be too complex for the gooblocks to work with). All words in goolang would be nouns, you could make adverbs by prefixing them with one of two special words meaning basically "good" and "bad", and make verbs by prefixing nouns or adverbs with yet one another special word ("make"). So from a noun "size", you could make "good size" => "big", "bad size" => "small", "make good size" => "grow", "make bad size" => "shrink", "make water" => "sweat", possibly also "good good size" => "bigger", "good good good size" => "biggest".

About the exact words or alphabet -alphabet can be gotten any way of any size (15-64 codepoints probably) with any glyphs (it really just has to look somewhat good), words can be basically generated by some script (goolang isn't aiming for human readability much)

That's about all I have had on my mind for now.
 
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brylie

New Member
Contributor
I like the overall idea of an 'archival' lanuage for Gooblocks.

only simple sentences with single subject and object
Your examples actually contain 'subject', 'object', and 'verb'.

All words in goolang would be nouns
That is a bit confusing, and may need to be changed. In effect, you have nouns, verbs, and adjectives at the least.

Perhaps focus less on the grammar constructs, and just build out the 'goo action archive' idea. This would be really cool as a proof-of-concept :)
 

Adrijaned

Administrator
Contributor
I might be just confusing some english terminology about what is "object". I meant by the simple structure that there would be always written who, and then what he does... I'm sure there must be some terms I'm missing.
On the second note, perhaps I should change "words" to "tokens"?
 

Adrijaned

Administrator
Contributor
Another random thought dump:
two-letter tokens would be for the special things, and would begin by one specific letter - that would leave the space for 26 special tokens
List of required special tokens:
  • and
  • or
  • not
  • above
  • below
  • behind
  • in front
  • left
  • right
  • the storyteller/main hero
  • after/later
  • earlier/before
  • good
  • bad
Non-important:
  • xor
  • main enemy/bad guy (if applicable for story)
four letter tokens would be for "significant" names of gooblocks/goo-less creatures (important heros (or all heroes of stories ever written, the character combination space is big enough), bad guys, The Old, The Ancients and such) All those four-char sequences would start with specific character, leaving 26^3 namespace. In dire need could be extended alike to UTF8 (eg if begins by specific two characters, is not 4 char long but six or so

three letter tokens (not beginning in any of the higher) are regular words, if need be can be extended by means similar to the "name" tokens - allows for 16224 regular words (should probably be enough)

Actual words can be machine generated, we just need to keep the track somewhere about the words already generated and make dictionary of them.
 
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