---
title: RFC: Back to Basics, or Organizational Sets
author: porpoiseless
---This document aims to address a cluster of related problems involving the categories initially laid out by John Quijada in Chapter 3: Basic Morphology of A Grammar of Ithkuil (AGOI), and to a lesser extent in the periodic releases documenting The Next Ithkuilic Language (TNIL). The three main issues we are attempting to resolve are as follows:
- Uncertainty exists around the licensing of terms used in AGOI. This may be a non-issue since Mr. Quijada has given written permission to use terms from AGOI with attribution. Nevertheless, it would be preferable to have a set of terms with an explicitly libre license for use in constructing philosophical languages.
- Many grammatical items have confusing names or descriptions. Replacing these names with more conventional or intuitive ones and supplying documentation in accessible language can not only improve this situation, but incidentally solve the licensing problem.
- Some categories have conceptual issues. For example some categories are unexpectedly non-orthogonal with each other, and some have a complex internal structure that could be made explicit.
[2020-07-31 Fri]
WIP Draft.
- @porpoiseless
The memo IP Protection for Constructed Languages discusses the legal difficulties in claiming a language as IP. While documentary text be protected, it doesn't appear that the name of a grammatical category can be.
Attached is the text of an email Mr. Quijada sent in response to the question of attribution for derived languages.
The only thing I require is that anyone basing their work on my own should prominently display a disclaimer announcement in their introduction or homepage, etc. stating that John Quijada’s Ithkuil language is the basis and inspirational source for their own work. If they borrow my morphological terminology, the disclaimer should state such as well.
John Q.
- Many categories in Ithkuil have confusing names.
- Configuration and Perspective are non-orthogonal.
- Perspective: what does it mean?
- Configuration has internal distinctions that are made more explicit in TNIL.
This document aims to answer the following question: What is the minimal set of derivational categories that must be marked on words formed from roots? In AGOI there are 6 derivational categories that must marked on such words.
| Original term | Libre equivalent or replacement |
|---|---|
| Configuration | Number, Connectedness, Composition |
| Affiliation | Disposition |
| Perspective | Quantification, Distribution |
| Extension | Envelope |
| Essence | [WIP] |
| Context | Domain |
| Designation | [TBD under Lexical categories] |
Quijada makes frequent use in this chapter of the term, "configurational set" which remains undefined throughout the work. Formalizing this notion will allow for a more rigorous interpretation of the language's semantics, and will help us write better documentation.
We rename "configurational set" to "organizational set" for three reasons:
- the legal concerns already discussed,
- "organization" better conveys the intent of the several categories involved than "configuration", and
- this proposal eliminates Configuration in favor of the categories that logically constitute its meaning (Number, Connectedness, Composition).
Like Configurational Sets in Ithkuil and TNIL, Organizational sets are a powerful way of expressing how a concept is instantiated in space and time. An Organizational Set is a collection of instances of a root marked for their number, proximity, and similarity.
| Category | Values | Question |
|---|---|---|
| Number | 4 | How many items in the set? |
| Connectedness | 3 | How closely are the items arranged? |
| Composition | 2 | Are the items physically similar? |
| Dispostition | 4 | What is the use/purpose/intent of the items with respect to one another? |
| Distribution | 2 | Is the set as a whole being discussed, or each member separately? |
| Envelope | 12 | What part of the set (or its members) is under consideration? |
| Quantification | 2 | Is the speaker making an existential universal claim? |
| Vagueness | 2 | Is the main term being used strictly or not? |
Number + Connectedness + Composition = 14 valid combinations
14*4*2*12*2*2 = 5376 combinations.
Number, Connectedness, and Composition are not quite orthogonal to each other because Connectedness and Composition cannot apply to Singular or Non-Count sets. In addition to those Numbers, Dual and Plural inflect for three values of Connectedness and two of Composition, yielding fourteen valid combinations of Number, Connectedness, and Composition.
| Number → | Non-Count | Singular |
|---|---|---|
| [No Composition, Connectedness] |
| Homogeneous | Dual | Plural |
|---|---|---|
| Isolated | ||
| Contiguous | ||
| Fused |
| Heterogeneous | Dual | Plural |
|---|---|---|
| Isolated | ||
| Contiguous | ||
| Fused |
The Non-Count number is the default and the most vague. Words marked with this value are conceptualized as mass quantities where the units are irrelevant or undisclosed. If language users wish to be more specific about the units, they can choose another number. For example, Non-Count is used to speak about "some water". If we are discussing a sensitive chemical process, it is entirely possible that "some water" can be only one or two molecules. But if in our discussion the individual quanta (and their homogeneity and connectedness) become relevant, we should use a different number.
| Value | Definition |
|---|---|
| Isolated | separate |
| Contiguous | adjacent, touching |
| Fused | attached, combined |
| Name | Definition |
|---|---|
| Homogeneous | uniform members |
| Heterogeneous | diverse members |
| Name | Definition |
|---|---|
| Ambivalent | unknown/irrelevant use/purpose |
| Oppositional | divided/conflicted use/purpose |
| Mutual | shared use/purpose |
| Synergetic | emergent use/purpose |
Distribution is a logical category with no equivalent in Ithkuil or TNIL. It governs whether operations are applied to individual items from a set or to set itself. Another way to think about Distribution: Conjunctive Distribution /singularizes/ the set.
| Value | Definition |
|---|---|
| Disjunctive | each instance separately |
| Conjunctive | all instances together |
Envelope identifies the spatiotemporal limits and dynamics of the set.
| Value | space | time |
|---|---|---|
| Partial | part | phase, moment, era of... |
| Holistic | all | (whole) duration of... |
| Initial | (spatial) beginning, first in a sequence | (beginning) beginning |
| Terminal | (spatial) end, last in a sequence | (temporal) end |
| Augmentive | physical/directional increase | development/becoming |
| Diminutive | physical/directional decrease | decay/ceasing-to-be |
Envelope currently scopes outside of distribution. Thus, by varying Distribution, we can refer to the beginning of the set, or the beginning of each member of the set.
"The beginning of a group of cows..." vs. "A group of cow-beginnings..."
It might be necessary to give Distribution a few more values so it can shuffle scope between Envelope and Quantification,
In AGOI the category of Perspective is introduced by way of a comparison to Number and Tense in natural languages. Perspective, the documentation explains, describes "the manner in which [a formative] is spatio-temporally instantiated".
AGOI enumerates four values for this category, with separate interpretations given to nouns and verbs in each.
- Monadic: "spatio-temporally unified or accessible manifestation"
- Unbounded: "temporally separated or inaccessible"
- Nomic: "a generic collective entity or archetype, containing all members or instantiations of a configurative set throughout space and time (or within a specified spatio-temporal context)"
- Abstract: "a configurative category into an abstract concept considered in a non-spatial, timeless, numberless context"
TNIL revises renames Unbounded to Polyadic and discards the notion of "accessibility", thereby eliminating questions about what is spatio-temporally unified or separated from what. Monadic vs. Polyadic now merely indicates singularity or plurality of the configurational set.
As for the latter two categories, they are more conceptually interesting but also more resistant to formalization. AGOI describes Nomic sets as either a "collective entity" or "an archetype". Without a clearer description of the use of this category, we are forced to make guesses.
If a "collective entity" means "all the named items throughout spacetime", then we might say, "The Dog has millions of legs". On the other hand if by Nomic we mean to refer to the archetype, then we might say, "The Dog takes up no space"--since surely the archetype of "dog" is not a physical object. Another point is that Nomic is not orthogonal to the Monadic vs. Polyadic distinction. Different speakers may have different archetypes in mind. Philosophers, for example, discuss "competing conceptions of the Good"; and while economists blithely refer to "the Market", I am reminded of a professor of mine who once said, "There is no Market, only markets."
Since "configurative set" implies a collection of the items named by the root, we are always dealing with these collections. Until, that is, we reach Nomic and Abstract. Monadic and Unbounded appear to deal with groups of the type of thing named by the root they modify, but Nomic and Abstract transform the type.
Abstract may be even worse. Not only does it suffer from the same non-orthogonality as Nomic, it appears to change the type of the word it modifies. At least with Nomic we can employ the semantics of plural logic and say that we are referring to all concrete instances.
Quoted from Ilmen on Discord, edited for formatting (removal of message timestamps and addition of required punctuation).
Toaq is based on plural logics (a logic system which avoids explicitly requiring the notion of sets to express plurality of things). From the point of view of sets, it's as if all the nouns referred to sets, singular nouns would be referring to singleton sets, and predicates/verbs would all be fed with sets, and they would usually make claim about the members of the sets and not about the sets themselves (for sets are not very interesting in themselves, they're abstract, they have membership and cardinality, and that's about all there is to them); as a result, predicates are free to decide by themselves to have a distributive or a collective usage of the sets passed to them, it's up to the definition of the predicate, and is indicated in the dictionary
As sets would be everywhere, they would be nowhere i.e. invisible. the universal quantifier could be described as referring to the maximal set of some given things and every possible subset of it cardinality predicates ("X is onesome / one in number", "X are two in number" etc) can be used to restrict the possible referents for the quantifiers: "every cows which are two in number" ≈ "every pair of cows" there's also an "X is/are among Y" which is homologuous to the subset relation for sets ("X is equal to or a subset of Y") "every one among us wore a hat" I seem to remember there was a funny picture for Lojban illustrating the difference between "the students each wore a hat" and "the students collectively wore a hat, i.e. a large hat covering all the students at once"
Quantification should be familiar to those with experience in predicate calculus.
| Value | Definition |
|---|---|
| Existential | "there exists...", at least one |
| Universal | every instance |
Quantification and Distribution operate together:
| Disjunctive | Conjunctive | |
|---|---|---|
| Existential | There is ("There is a pair of cows with eight legs [each].") | There is ("There is a pair of cows with eight legs [in total].") |
| Universal | Each ("They each carried a stone.") | All ("They all carried a stone [together].") |
| Value | Definition |
|---|---|
| Vague | "something like", "what passes for"; questionable set membership |
| Precise | clear set membership |
vagueness(
quantification(
envelope(
distribution(
disposition(
composition(
connectedness(
number(
root))))))))
| Vote | Name |
|---|---|
| +1 | @uakci |
| +1 | @toimine |
Draft.