The software would:
- Be a better way to learn languages (which would be the direct goal).
- (Indirectly) teach the user how to abstract out the logical substructure of natural language (in practice).
- (Indirectly) teach the user the skeleton for an artificial language.
- With enough users, (indirectly) flesh out the skeleton of the artificial language.
Imagine that you’re studying Japanese with flashcard software (e.g., Anki), with the front of each flashcard being the Japanese (whether spoken, written, or both) and the back of each flashcard being the English translation (again whether spoken, written, or both). My software would also be flashcard software, the difference being:
- The software would guess what it should test you on. Its guesses would get better over time, and eventually it would be able to guess how much vocabulary you know, how much grammar you know, how good your ear is, etc. (That would be motivating because the software would show your language-learning progress in real time. The more you immerse and the more you study the flashcards, the faster you see your vocabulary growing etc.)
- The back of each flashcard wouldn’t be an English translation but a translation into the artificial language.
On #2: Imagine again that you’re studying Japanese. You try to understand the Japanese on the front of the flashcard, and then you check the back in order to check whether you were right. By default, the software would show you only the translation into the 1-dimensional modality of the artificial language. You’d have various options:
- Generate the 2-dimensional-modality artificial-language transliteration.
- Hover your cursor over anything in the Japanese on the front of the card or the artificial-language translation/transliteration on the back of the card, which would show you which chunks, whether bigger or smaller, in the Japanese, correspond to which chunks, again whether bigger or smaller, in either the 1-dimensional translation or the corresponding 2-dimensional transliteration.
- Click any of those chunks, whether a word, phrase, or sentence, in order to AI-generate a visualization of a prototypical example. Click again in order to generate another visualization. Gradually, the visualizations would go from more prototypical to less.
Besides letting the user study flashcards, the software would also let users input the 1-dimensional and 2-dimensional modalities of the artificial language themselves in order to write either to themselves or other users. Most importantly, they could message other users in artificial language (not to mention English, Japanese, or any other natural language popular enough to be easy to include). With enough users who (indirectly) know the artificial language, an international Republic of Letters could come about. If, say, a monolingual Japanese person learns English with the software and a monolingual Korean person learns German, then they have no shared natural language. The artificial language would be the easiest way to communicate, which could naturally make the artificial language into their lingua franca.
The artificial language could also just end up being (like arithmetical, algebraic, and other mathematical notation) a useful supplement to natural language: an international notational system (for laying bare the logical substructure of natural language). (Another possibility: It could also just end up being a tool for formalizing logic, linguistics, and the relationship between logic and linguistics.)
But how would I make the artificial language more natural? The software would let the users add new symbols to the open-class vocabulary, which would let them naturally change the artificial language in practice.