Developing and creating a means of communication through a visual language
Advisor: Ms. Sagal
Internship Location: Ran's Art studio
Onsite Mentor: Ran Mu
People have different cultures from all over the world, but are still part of one world. We've been seeing the same world through our eyes, and what better to communicate than with what we see? The visual world is a language shared by all people capable of seeing, so a universal visual language would be achievable and useful for many situations. Such a language does exist- Blissymbols- a language where each meaning is a symbol. However, Blissymbols is held back by the abstract nature of the symbols. In response, I propose a language where as much abstraction is taken out as possible, with every meaning and every word being a complete picture, or illustration, to achieve for universality in the fullest. Although not the best language for everyday use, this language does come in handy given situations of interactions with people with little to no translation ability. Having expertise aid from Ran Mu, art teacher to varying age groups for over 15 years, I will be creating my project under her expertise in hit location Ran's Art Studio. I will first work to develop the language, making it as easily understood as possible, and then testing to see if it can truly achieve universality, where even without formally learning the language, or with very minimal learning, people would be able to easily understand the idea. The testing portion of my project will take place in Basis Independent Fremont Lower, where I will use my school's resources to test my project on children attending the school. If everything works correctly, I will have created a language that is able to transmit simple ideas past the borders of language and understanding, able to be used in situations requiring immediate communication.
Project Blog
Week 0: Introduction
My name is Anruo Zheng, and over the next few months, I will be constructing a language based on pictures for the purpose of Universality, and see how well it turns out.
We've had different languages since the beginning of time, and with it comes different cultures. These languages and cultures aren't usually mutually intelligible. But we all live in the same world, see the same pictures through the same eyes. In this way, the visual world is a language that all can speak, or rather, see.
Imagine we used this language to the greatest extent, where as much of the world population as possible could understand each other.
One such language has attempted this: Blissymbols, created by Charles K Bliss. However, if you look at the language, you'd find that it's very abstract. Instead of pictures, every word is a sign or symbol. In response, I propose a language with minimal abstraction, where each word is a whole picture, a whole "illustration." The lack of abstraction will achieve universality as much as possible.
I will be testing the effects of how well this language functions on children in the lower campus, seeing how much they need to be taught before being able to recognize meanings. The less sessions taught, the more universal it would be measured.
For the following weeks, I will start deciding on the basic building blocks of the language, such as the function of separate squiggles or lines. Then, I will be deciding on grammar, such as sentence structure, functional words such as "-ed" for markers for tense, etc. The last part of creation will be deciding on a dictionary for vocabulary.
Until then, I'll be busy making little drawings, but this time with permission, and not secretly during class!
Thank you for reading.
Week 1
Welcome back,
First week, first real blog.
Finally having some time to work by myself, I began by working on the fundamental building blocks of the language, which you could understand as the "phonemes."
Phonemes, in normal speaking languages, you would understand as the sounds it has. For example, in the word "Cat," you'd have kuh, ahh, tuh. You get what I mean, those are the separate sounds.
Mine clearly doesn't have sound, of course- it's a visual language. So instead, I mapped them out to have different shapes, from circles to hexagons, advanced shapes, such as arrows to crosses, and slightly abstract symbols. Of course, I will work to make sure these symbols harbors as less abstract meaning as possible
And of course, my whole project is based on having pictures for words. Given that every picture is different for every word, every picture will also be a separate "phoneme". What a language.
Then, I decided that more "phonemes" will come along as I decide the morphemes, this time without parenthesis. They are real morphemes.
I decided to take inspiration from the Chinese grammar system. They all say Chinese is an incredibly hard language to learn, but it's actually one of the languages with the least inflections in the world. This means that every definitive part of the sentence, is a separate word.
Inflections are changes made to the word form to give it more information. In English, a common form of inflection is in verbs, for example: to walk turns into walks for third person, walking for progressive and walked for past tense. In Chinese, we make no difference- walk is walk.
I'm keeping this in mind, because this grammar system will mean that each and every meaning needs a different verb. It wouldn't be walked- it would be walk + past tense word. It wouldn't be schools, it would be school + plural word.
Well, that's all folks, see you next week.
Week 2
Week 2
Welcome back to you and I. I just had a 10 day trip with some of my closest friends in my life, but that also means I didn't do much this week.
Anyway, moving on.
As a child, my parents bought me a book on 简笔画(jian bi hua), which are just super simple cartoon drawings that even kids can draw.
http://www.jianbihua.org/jianbihua/49759.html
Here's an example. As you see, super simple lines, not a lot of strokes, but very evidently a goose. That would be the best case scenario- easy to draw and easy to tell. I had decided to base my vocabulary "words" off of this concept.
However, the problem exists that sometimes words are too abstract to be drawn, even avoiding purely functional words, such as articles, prepositions, or auxiliary verbs: if, because, -ed, 's, etc. These abstract words include verbs such as to be, to feel, to create, or nouns such as beauty, generosity, or pain.
Although this would be a pain to figure out, my goal is to decrease abstractness as much as possible, rather than completely eliminating it.
Well, that's it folks, see you next week.
Week 3
Week 3
Welcome back, folks. Happy week 3.
This week, I imagined, was supposed to be the most fun week.
turned the words into little pictures. But I quickly became frustrated due to a problem I had already predicted would drive me insane. Some of these words are just impossibly abstract. How would I draw the verb "To be"?
I had already gotten rid of some things I thought weren't needed, such as articles, or took apart ideas that would be one word in English, such as past tense and possessives.
In my head, a constant struggle repeats itself. How many ideas can I completely eliminate, and still make it a whole language? Should I make it more abstract, make it harder to understand, but a more complete language? Or should I go deeper into the idea that it should be understandable at first glance?
So, for now, I've been focusing on ones that I can draw. Take a look at some examples.
In case you(understandably) can't read my handwriting, these are pronouns addressing he/she/it, me(speaker/drawer), or you(the addressed) respectively.
Well, that's all folks, see you next time.
Week 4
Welcome back, folks. Happy week four.
Having been stuck on the problem of abstraction for a while, I moved on to sentence structures.
Using a quick google search, I concluded that the most popular type of sentence structure is SVO- Subject Verb Object. This is easy to understand- its English. The subject verbed the object.
Overall, these little drawings will go from left to right, following the direction that most of the world followed. easy peasy.
How would an adjective describe a noun? How would an adverb describe a verb? Here's what I decided:
To describe, one would put the adjective(or adverb) before whatever word it's describing, then put it in a nice circle.
This is a blue dog.
Let's take a look at a full sentence based on the limited vocabulary we do have.
The more I look at it, the more it's… practically English. Try guessing what it means.
The woman's dog is going inside the house. (you could understand it as, inside of the house)
That's it folks, see you next week.
Week 5
Welcome back. I am halfway through. What a struggle.
Adding on words is an endless task. As you can imagine, I continued doing that, as well as modelled some more sample sentences.
In fact, I made a couple of words that I'm pretty proud of. take a look.
This is the verb to be. It's you, or another person, and a verb marker. They're just being them.
This is the verb, to do, to make. Because you usually do and make things with your hand…
And because of these two, I ultimately decided to add the verb marker, as I think that would broadly increase my overall scope of words possible.
Then, I moved on to some commonly needed phrases.
Evacuate area. Stay in your homes. Beware of sharks. Where is bathroom? I lost my passport. Men attacking me!
These phrases are really what the language was made for. Emergencies. Not things like,
"Quantum systems have bound states that are quantized to discrete values of energy, momentum, angular momentum, and other quantities, in contrast to classical systems where these quantities can be measured continuously." (wikipedia)
In order to prepare for next week, where I have to introduce my language to children, I have also began lesson planning.
Well, that's all folks, see you next week.
Week 6
Week 6
Welcome back folks. Welcome to week 6.
This week was pretty big, because it's the first week where I go to the lower campus and do some teaching with some fifth graders.
In regards to the language, there's not much left to do- All that's left is to continue making words to expand the dictionary.
About the lower school experience. The kids were nice.
The lesson I prepared only included the notion of subject verb object- giving them only the necessities to produce the most basic of the basic sentences. Turns out the lesson wouldn't really take that long, and the rest of the time every little kid came up and translated a sentence into the language.
What I didn't predict was that they didn't really understand the idea behind the vocabulary- I wanted for each word to be exactly as I drew them, but they started drawing stick figures. I started wondering if that might actually work. I'll take the next week to ponder on it.
Next class, however, I have a lot to teach about. Tense markers, prepositions, plurals, adjectives and adverbs. Maybe it'll take up the whole hour that time.
See you next time.
Week 7
Well, this week is the kids' spring break, and so I have nobody to teach.
There's really nothing left to really "invent" or any problems to solve. I just have to keep expanding my vocabulary inventory.
Here's a look at some new words and rules.
This is the verb, to think. What's so special about this? This is one of the first words I've made in which the verb marker doesn't have to be there. In other words, without the verb marker, it would just be a full noun. Although another example includes the word To Be, previously talked about, I feel this one is a lot easier to understand. To think, a thought. Easy peasy.
Some question words:
what?
when?
where?
An interesting system for depicting plurals I came up with, for 2, 3, and more than 3, respectively:
(x stands in place for any noun)
We have the tense markers, the twins past and future:
The general rule is that these act like adverbs describing the main predicate.
That's all folks, see you next week.
Week 8
Hi folks, welcome to week, 8. What a week.
So, this week, after learning that my previously planned lesson was too short, I just piled everything up into this one. Everything I wanted to cover this week, as well as what I covered last week, since some kids weren't here. This was actually because there was a number of fresh faces. I also wanted the last and final week to be a test of sorts, where I had them a worksheet and basically test how well they've learned it.
In summary of that paragraph, I combined everything into one lesson, and will take the next week to see how it worked.
In terms of how the class went- the same as any class, really. The kids that listened did great, the kids that didn't, didn't.
On one specific occasion, I drew the sentence, the dog thought a small thought. Here what mine looked like: (a recreation)
The first kid came up and translated it perfectly. Then the dean pointed out a kid that hadn't been paying attention, so I called him up to the board to redraw the sentence. Here's his version (after having taken a while)
I had to remind him to add the past tense marker and the verb marker a couple of times, but it's understandable, that is the hardest part. As English speakers with pretty much the exact same sentence structure, though, they should be able to make do without verb markers.
Well, That's it folks, see you next week.
Week 9
Hi folks, welcome back, it's time for week 9!
This week was the last week I taught my language at the lower campus. I've gotten to know the kids, they're all super nice, as well as the dean! I couldn't express with words how grateful I was for the opportunity.
Anyway, this week, it was time to test how well they've learned it, in basically one class I repeated over 3 weeks (fresh faces kept showing up). I handed out pieces of paper, and had them translate the language into english, and english into the language.
Here's an example:
Anyway, now I'm in the process of analyzing these papers, for my efficiency in teaching as well as how well the language worked. I had them not correct their mistakes.
From what I've noticed so far, the kids weren't quite grasping the idea of vocabulary as I'd hoped, as I'd hoped for them to completely copy the drawings I'd made. For example, for several words that use a human shape, it would be replaced with a stickman. It might be that this vocabulary is too skill-based, and by the end of these sessions, I've begun to accept stick figures as long as it gets the meaning across.
Alright, that's it folks, see you next week.
Week 10
Last week, folks. Welcome back.
Nothing to say about this week- it's the week where I finish everything. Final product, presentation, poster board. Needless to say, it's the hardest week of them all.
This week I had finished analyzing the papers, to come to a sad realization- The language was not successful according to my standards.
Having the kids translate from English to Symbl was not as disastrous, over 50% of the kids got the two questions correct.
However, Symbl to English was not as successful, as for 2 of the 3 questions, over 50% of the children got it wrong. The one anomaly was, "where is the bathroom?" which I hypothesized received a whopping 100% correct due to how common it is.
I believe that being able to translate from Symbl to English really tests if the children were able to understand the language. Perhaps it's due to the lack of time, lack of practice, or of course, the language was not intuitive enough to learn.
I suspect that, with more time, the language could reach the expectations I had set in the beginning of the Project's journey.
Well, that's it folks. Come see my presentation!