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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • Well, ok, if all OP wanted to know is what a copyright license is:

    By default, copyright law in most countries prohibits anyone except the author or other copyright holder from distributing creative works, including software, even in modified form. There are a few exceptions to this, but this is the general rule.

    A license is a document that the copyright holder agreed to that grants someone permission to do so anyway.

    In the context of open source, such a license needs to meet certain conditions to be considered open source. Among other things it needs to allow anyone (not just specific licensees) to distribute the software for any purpose, even in modified form.





  • Yes, of course I’m talking about spoken language. Of course if English were written in kanji we would need fewer characters to express the same information, but it wouldn’t change the spoken language at all.

    (I remember learning the following graphical user interface design rule: switch your application to Spanish or Portuguese to check whether UI messages still fit in the boxes you’ve put them in. Spanish and Portuguese are the common languages that need the most characters per unit of information.)


  • There already are plenty of conlangs (constructed languages). The main thing that differentiates them from natural languages is the fact that their grammar generally doesn’t have any exceptions (irregular verbs or nouns). It would be possible to create such a language based on the grammar and vocabulary of English.

    The only conlang I’m proficient in is Esperanto, which definitely works very well for practical communication. One cool feature about Esperanto is the system of prefixes and suffixes that acts as a vocabulary shortcut, for example the word for “cold” is just “un-warm” (varma / malvarma), or the word for “school” is just “learning-place” (lerni / lernejo). The language you’re imagining would likely also consist of words like “unwarm” and “learnery”.

    Meanwhile I don’t think the length of (root) words needs to be especially short. Studies have found that all languages transmit information at approximately the same rate, which is why Spanish with its relatively long words seems to be spoken so fast. Human brain capacity is a limiting factor for things like that.