The Root Word System

I was looking up a word in the dictionary when a thought came into my mind. A dictionary is actually a symptom of how inefficient our language is.

A perfect language, if it could exist, would actually resemble the number system that we use. Our number system is far more efficient than our word system. Numbers are self-explanatory, while words are not.

You do not need a dictionary to tell you the meaning of a number, because there is really no way to define a number better than the number itself. But suppose we used a different system and the symbol for the number 357 was completely different from the number 358. You would then need to carry a number dictionary around.

Of course, such a system would be highly illogical. But, this is the way words operate. Two closely similar words can mean completely different things in the same way that two similar things may be described by totally different words. In contrast we know that two similar numbers, such as the 357 and 358, must mean close to the same thing.

Unlike numbers, words were thrown together haphazardly over the centuries. Words are organized as verbs, nouns, pronouns, adverbs and, adjectives. But reality is fundamentally numbers and is ordered like our numbering system. We could have taken great advantage of this, except that the words were already in existence.

Words are different from numbers in that only a tiny fraction of the things that could potentially exist actually do exist and need to be assigned a word. In contrast, every number is known to exist whether it is manifested or not. It would make no sense to imagine things that do not exist and assign words to them.

Humans used symbols to represent words long before the idea of alphabets came along. Letters of the alphabet were used to represent spoken sounds and, written words were grafted onto spoken words.

Then I got to wondering, what if letters had come first so that they could have been used from the beginning to represent words, using an alphabet? We could have structured words like numbers and they would be just about as self-explanatory as numbers. Words could have successive roots and, building words would be like building molecules from atoms.

For example, the word "atom" could be such a root word so that anything associated with atoms, such as the component electrons, neutrons and, protons, would be assigned words with the root "atom-". Another such root word could be "house-", and anything associated with a house would be assigned words built on this root word. Root words could be combined together, if necessary, with the most fundamental one coming first.

We could even make the system still more efficient by assigning root words by which letter of the alphabet they begin with, so that related or similar things would be assigned similar words. We would start with dividing all words into the parts of speech: verbs, nouns, etc.

The incredible efficiency that would have been possible with such a word system can be extended to sentences. The fundamantal unit of communication is really the sentence, rather than the word. But we are forced to revolve communication around the word, due to this great inefficiency. It would often be possible to crunch sentences together into a single word. This would be extremely useful digitally.

Such a root word system to make words operate in the same way as the number system would bring us almost unfathomable advantages. For one thing, it would make learning immeasurably easier. Students would need to learn only a relatively few root words. Also the more fundamantal the word was, and thus the more frequently it is likely to be used, the shorter the word would be.

Not only would the Root Word System be incredibly efficient, it would make it a simple matter to translate between languages. It would be so easy for any document to be analyzed by computer because it would essentially be a program in itself and the compiler would only have to parse the root words.

Even if you do not think that the Root Word System is a practical idea at this point, because it would involve creating a whole new human language, it could start off as a computer language.