People invent languages for all sorts of reasons. They have been made to exhibit artistic beauty, vivify fictional worlds, unite different peoples, investigate the structure of grammar, and implement philosophical visions. My reason for inventing languages is none of the above - I explore the essence of language for the same reason that I am interested in learning language.

Language is built right into our systems of perception. Through years of exposure, we learn to separate the sounds, structures, and perspectives of a language. We acquire this skill to such a high ability as to be able to instantly verify and correct mistakes in complex grammars. What if we applied this skill to other domains? I can only imagine what we might unlock by engraving such a strong ability in some other domain into our perceptive structures.

It is for these reasons that my favorite constructed languages are probably Lojban and Toki Pona. In diverging so far from the linguistic norm, I feel like they are the best in their class at poking at how we perceive information. I have also taken a lot of interest in learning braille, morse, and sign language. Doing so will require me to learn to perceive different physical ways of encoding information.

I want to go a lot further though. Although I haven't got the time to flesh out these ideas for constructed languages at the moment yet, I maintain this list anyways:

• A toki pona equivalent that is designed around the categories in which I percieve the world (as opposed to those of Sonja Lang)
• A language communicated by means of holding hands, by applying pressure in different areas
• Communication over a board game, where grammaticality is defined as sensible play
• Grammatical omni-permissibility.
• Dual Scripts which permit weird things like inverting colors or flipping upside down for another meaning
• A language communicated on paper. Not like writing - that is just the imposition of a time-linear language onto paper, and it doesn't actually take advantage of the 2-dimensionality of the paper at all. Non-linearly organized languages, resulting in something that looks like bulkier chinese characters but each productively expresses a complete idea instead of just a morpheme
• Perhaps a language in which sentences define their own grammatical structures
• And what about a language with no separable units, like, no individual words or phonemes? Meaning would just be a van-gogh slur of information
• Communication entirely by means of the untyped lambda calculus
• Tying a linguistic idea of grammaticality to a musical one would be really cool. Solresol doesn't even attempt this.
• I'm working on embedding Quechua into a knotted-rope script!

I think... I like playing with the modality of language, because I think language and board games and music and reality are all different reverberations of the same pattern.