Questionable handbook for the interandroid fictional language
The interandroid space language is mainly used for communication between Android robots in distant worlds.
The language itself is a work in progress, but feel free to use it for any sort of creative writings (poems, songs, short-stories ...). If you do so, we will be delighted to hear about it ...
Here you can find a basic translator.
We are building a CC BY-SA 4.0 dictionary, and you are much welcome to contribute to it. Words in that dictionary are based on a core-vocabulary (origin) that we will try to keep stable - as soon as we have a clear view of what words should really be in it -.
The language is very classic in that it supports nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and determiners. The first letter of the word gives a hint about this.
Because of the core-vocabulary, direct translation between an english word and an interandroid one is not always possible. In some cases, the interandroid language may be more precise (ex: pronouns) and in some other cases vaguer (ex: animals). Animals for instance, are only vaguely related to their Earth's counterparts. A tiger and a lion may be represented by the same word. You have to keep in mind, that in the remote worlds, well known Earth personalities and animals may not exist at all. For this reason, the core language tends to contain only word that one may expect to find in any world.
The alphabet for interandroid words is made of the twelve characters: '┼', '╀', '┾', '╄', '╁', '╂', '╆', '╊', '┽', '╃', '┿', '╇'. For composed words, the separator '┄' can be used, unfortunately this is not yet supported in the UI.
In addition, you can separate:
- words with ◌,
- clauses with ◌◌,
- sentence clauses with ◌◌◌,
- sentences with ◌◌◌◌,
- paragraphs with ◌◌◌◌◌.
The language supports the following tenses:
- FarPast, a long time ago. It may be a few hundreds years ago or millions of years ago.
- Past, recent past, such as last week.
- Present, the time now.
- Future, the close future, such as tomorrow or next month.
- FarFuture, in a very long time, probably several generations later or in a few centuries.
- Hypothesis, statement that could possibly happen.
- Request, a call for help in satisfying a request.
- Promise, a pledge to satisfy a particular request.
- Attempt, an attempt at implementing a proposition.
- Prediction, the forecasting of a future event.
- Warning, a warning about something that could happen.
- Fantasy, a fantasy of what could happen.
The exact grammar is not formalised yet, but the structure of a sentence is expected to respect the classic "subject verb object". The assumption is that the clause before the verb(s) is the subject while the clause after is the object. Before the subject, it should be possible to add clauses to indicate a time, location or any other context.
While the language may sound rich enough for most situations, its ultimate purpose is to be used by fictional (or perhaps real) Android chat bots. They may not all be as talented as C-3PO to understand complex language construction. For this reason, the grammar should be predictable and each sentence should try to limit the number of ideas. Even humans struggle with very long sentences, and primitive bots should not be any different. On the other hand, too short sentences may feel unatural and dull, so a balance will have to be striked.
That's it! Best of luck !!
- Copyright (c) 2017-2020 Olivier Huin
- The source code of this program (Elm, python) is under The MIT License
- The language and the use of the language itself will have very open license that still need to be discussed, most likely something in the spirit of public domain https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/