Does Fiction Affect Reality? Duh.

[CW: content warning for discussion of sexual violence at the end of the post.]

I’ve seen a lot of discussion lately on whether there are moral/ethical consequences to writing certain kinds of fiction. And the answer to me appears to be an unequivocal “yes”. Although regular readers of this blog are probably aware that I have a wide range of interests, the primary purpose of this site is to explore what’s called “speculative linguistics”, that is the combination of real language science and its depiction in fiction, especially speculative fiction such as science fiction and fantasy. Maybe the most famous example of speculative linguistics is the “conlang”, short for constructed language, which is an umbrella term for artificial languages created for a variety of purposes, but most commonly for use as magical or alien languages in speculative fiction/sff(h) literature.

And that’s a fun topic. But today we’re going to take a dive into the science side of speculative linguistics and talk about the relationship not only between fiction(thought) and reality, but also between both of them and the intermediary of language. This could be a dull boring article, or I could use my actual writing style to make my point:

Human beings do not stand on a hard bedrock of objective reality, but rather swim through a vast ocean of narrative, catching in their gaping mouths whatever strands feed their desires of the moment. It’s quite a philosophical argument whether an objective reality even exists, but I’m going to assume one does for the purposes of argument. But even assuming that, there are two layers between objective reality and our perception of it: the first is the channel of our senses, which make different kinds of information about the world around us available to our minds. If you’ve ever taken one of those colorblindness tests as a kid, then you know that not only do these senses only capture limited information, but they are unreliable.

Although we usually talk about “the five senses: touch, taste, hearing, sight, and smell”, in fact what we really have is visible light detection(a narrow band of electromagnetic radiation), sound wave detection(sensing disturbances primarily in air particles, but also solids and liquids), pressure sensitivity, temperature sensitivity, a weak ability to detect airborne chemicals, a moderate ability to differentiate chemicals by out taste buds, and depending on who you listen to, a couple other minor ways of capturing information. So, an actually very limited way of measuring “reality”.

And then, of course, our brain filters out, without any real conscious control on our part, the “unnecessary” information, such as the feeling of our clothes, various background and far away noises, etc. And finally, after all that, we (only) guess at the connections between the various limited streams of sensory input to develop a model of the world and its natural laws.

And then, finally, we condense this information down into words, which are the primary form of passing information between separate human consciousnesses. In modern times we have things like videos or audio files, or memes/gifs. And of course dance, or more importantly music, can be used to communicate.

At this point you may be wondering if I’m actually going to talk about fiction versus reality at all.

But it’s important to understand all these little details of how our brains and senses function, because “fiction” is pleasurable to us because it engages these senses in ways that the real world doesn’t always. Our brains are designed to find useful patterns for navigating “objective reality”/the world based on our limited sensory inputs. And fiction is a way to both create/manipulate and comment on the patterns our brains discover to create a satisfying emotional reaction. Now you know what a “narrative” is. An artificial pattern designed to evoke a specific emotional reaction.

Our brains learn patterns by discovering consistent outcomes to various actions/combinations of sensory input. And we base not only our intentional actions on those patterns, but even our feelings about things are unconscious reflections of those patterns. People are not born with a full and innate set of feelings and emotional responses; we develop them over time based on our experiences.

The goal of fiction is to create a narrative that closely mimics our learned patterns and our emotional responses to those patterns, and to trick us into seeing those narratives as “real” on an emotional level, even if intellectually we know that dragons aren’t real, for example. And because we have studied fiction for a long time, and practiced it, and are surrounded by it, we’ve gotten very good at tricking our brains into treating it as almost the same as patterns we’ve learned from “real life” experiences. If words on a page could not affect they way we respond emotionally to reality, then all of human culture would have been unsuccessful. Propaganda and “fake news” would not be so effective.

Our brains have a great deal of trouble differentiating patterns learned from fiction from those learned from reality. So no, fiction cannot “affect reality”, but it can and absolutely does, even in ways you aren’t aware of at the time, affect our perception of reality on a fundamental level. And because humans and our opinions and culture live almost entirely on a diet of narrative, our perceptions and reality are basically the same thing.

If you watch people behave a certain way and that behavior is almost always met with approval, or at least not disapproval, your brain learns that that behavior is good, or at least acceptable/normal. And as social beings, we base our behavior far more on what we are taught is acceptable than on our own personal reactions. As much as people try to deny it, we do a very poor job of distinguishing between “reality” and fiction, when we look for examples of acceptable behavior. Your brains is almost equally willing to use behavior depicted in stories to determine what is acceptable as behavior you see with your own eyes. Why else would advice columns or r/amitheasshole and r/relationships be so popular? If you trust Dear Abby’s relationship advice as much as your mother’s, why wouldn’t you believe it when behavior shown in a book is clearly approved of by the author?

Your opinions as an individual are based at least as much on the prevailing views of your culture as on your own personal experiences. You’re as like to believe Superman telling you something is okay as you are your father.

I think it’s useful to point out that of course fiction is only one influence on your beliefs, and also that that influence only applies to the situations depicted in the story. Violent videogames won’t make you a killer unless you find yourself on a HALO fighting the Flood. But certainly playing enough Call of Duty or Gears of War will make you look more favorably on war/violence as a solution to certain types of conflict.

And we can also look at other sources of narrative besides prose fiction to prove our point: if all you know of someone is their image on social media, you’re likely to believe that that’s who they are in real life. They’ve created a narrative, a likely partially fictional one, to influence your perception of them, and it works. If you believe someone is an amazing person, it doesn’t really matter if that’s true; we base our actions on our opinions, because of course it’s impossible to actually know every single truth of objective reality.

And finally, we need to remember that the way brains learn means that both quantity of evidence–the number of times you are exposed to a certain narrative–and how long you’ve been exposed to that evidence without counter-evidence is far more important than quality of evidence–your personal experiences on the topic. if you’ve been told your whole life, by parents, friends, television, books, etc, that staking is romantic for example, you won’t immediately realize that’s not true the first time you experience stalking.

If you’ve been told your whole life that “leading someone on” means you owe them sex, the fact that you don’t want to have sex with them, or even the fact that they bullied you into it and you hated it, won’t immediately counteract years of cultural conditioning. You won’t immediately realize that you don’t actually “owe” them sex, or that just because they claimed to feel “lead on” doesn’t mean you actually did so.

To make an extreme example, just because an example of child porn was a cartoon, and therefore “didn’t hurt any real people”, or just because that creepy m/m romance by a straight woman wasn’t about real people and “therefore it can’t be fetishizing”, that doesn’t mean it has no effect in that area. A book or a cartoon or a song still applauds or condemns some form of behavior, and it can and does still reinforce a narrative about what’s okay and what isn’t.

tl;dr– Reality doesn’t matter. Perception of reality matters. If something like a book affects someone’s perception of reality/acceptable behavior/opinion on global warming, that’s just as good as affecting reality, because the person will act on that perception. People often can distinguish between fiction and reality, but that doesn’t mean they actually do, especially if that fiction supports and opinion they already hold.

Tune in next time for a discussion on the actual mechanics of how fiction and use of language can be used to affect people’s perception of reality, emotional response to a subject or scene/character, and maybe a little bit on how you can use this to make a conlang or culture really stand out on the page.

 

Machine “Translation” and What Words Mean in Context

One of the biggest commonly known flaws of mahcine translation is a computer’s inability to understand differing meaning in context.  After all, a machine doesn’t know what a “horse” is.  It knows that “caballo” has (roughly) the same meaning in Spanish as “horse” does in English.  But it doesn’t know what that meaning is.

And it certainly doesn’t know what it means when we say that someone has a “horse-face”(/”face like a horse”).

 

But humans can misunderstand meaning in context, too.  For example, if you don’t know how “machine translation” works, you’d think that machines could actually translate or produce translations.  You would be wrong.  What a human does to produce a translation is not the same as what a machine does to produce a “translation”.  That’s why machine and human translators make different mistakes when trying to render the original meaning in the new language.

 

A human brain converts words from the source language into meaning and the meaning back into words in the target language.  A computer converts words from the source language directly to words in the target language, creating a so-called “literal” translation.  A computer would suck at translating a novel, because the figures of speech that make prose (or poetry) what they are are incomprehensible to a machine.  Machine translation programs lack the deeply associated(inter-connected) knowledge base that humans use when producing and interpreting language.

 

A more realistic machine translation(MT) program would require an information web with connections between concepts, rather than words, such that the concept of horse would be related to the concepts of leg, mane, tail, rider, etc, without any intervening linguistic connection.

Imagine a net of concepts represented as data objects.  These are connected to each other in an enormously complex web.  Then, separately, you have a net of linguistic objects, such as words and grammatical patterns, which are overlaid on the concept net, and interconnected.  The objects representing the words for “horse” and “mane” would not have a connection, but the objects representing the concept of meaning underlying these words would have, perhaps, a “has-a” connection, also represented by a connection or “association” object.

In order to translate between languages like a human would, you need your program to have an approximation of human understanding.  A famous study suggested that in the brain of a human who knows about Lindsay Lohan, there’s an actual “Lindsay” neuron, which lights up whenever you think about Lindsay Lohan.  It’s probably lighting up right now as you read this post.  Similarly, in our theoretical machine translation program information “database”, you have a “horse” “neuron” represented by our concept object concept that I described above.  It’s separate from our linguistic object neuron which contains the idea of the word group “Lindsay Lohan”, though probably connected.

Whenever you dig the concept of horse or Lindsay Lohan from your long-term memory, your brain sort of primes the concept by loading it and related concepts into short-term memory, so your “rehab” neuron probably fires pretty soon after your Lindsay neuron.  Similarly, our translation program doesn’t keep it’s whole data-set in RAM constatnly, but loads it from whatever our storage medium is, based on what’s connected to our currently loaded portion of the web.

Current MT programs don’t translate like humans do.  No matter what tricks or algorithms they use, it’s all based on manipulating sequences of letters and basically doing math based on a set of equivalences such as “caballo” = “horse”.  Whether they do statistical analysis on corpuses of previously-translated phrases and sentences like Google Translate to find the most likely translation, or a straight0forward dictionary look-up one word at a time, they don’t understand what the text they are matching means in either language, and that’s why current approaches will never be able to compare to a reasonably competent human translator.

It’s also why current “artificial intelligence” programs will never achieve true human-like general intelligence.  So, even your best current chatbot has to use tricks like pretending to be a Ukranian teenager with bad English skills on AIM to pass the so-called Turing test.  A side-walk artist might draw a picture perfect crevasse that seems to plunge deep into the Earth below your feet.  But no matter how real it looks, your elevation isn’t going to change.  A bird can;t nest in a picture of tree, no matter how realistically depicted.

Calling what Google Translate does, or any machine “translation” program does translation has to be viewed in context, or else it’s quite misleading.  Language functions properly only in the proper context, and that’s something statistical approaches to machine translation will never be able to imitate, no matter how many billions of they spend on hardware or algorithm development.  Could you eventually get them to where they can probably usually mostly communicate the gist of a short newspaper article?  Sure.  Will you be able to engage live in witty reparte with your mutually-language exclusive acquaintance over Skype?  Probably not.  Not with the kind of system we have now.

Those crude, our theoretical program with knowledge web described above might take us a step closer, but even if we could perfect and polish it, we’re still a long way from truly useful translation or AI software.  After all, we don;t even understand how we do these things ourselves.  How could we create an artificial version when the natural one still eludes our grasp?

 

The Translation Problem: People vs. Computers

In my last post, I introduced the topic of natural language processing and discussed the issue of how the context of a piece of language has an enormous impact on its translation into another language.  In this post, I want to address issue with translation.  Specifically, I want to talk how language is really an integrated function of the way the human brain models the world, and why this might make it difficult to create a machine translator isolated from the rest of an artificial intelligence.

When a human uses language they are expressing things that are based upon an integrated model of the universe in which they live.  There is a linguistic model in their brain that divides up their concept of the world into ideas representable by words.  For example, let’s look at the word “pit bull”.  (It’s written with two words, but as a compound word, it functions as a single noun.)  Pit bull is a generic term for a group of terrier dog breeds.  Terriers are dogs.  Dogs are mammals.  Mammals are animals.  This relationship is called a hypernym/hyponym relationship.  All content words(nouns/verbs/adjectives) are part of a hierarchical tree of hypo-/hyper-nym relationships.

So when you talk about a pit bull, you’re invoking the tree to which it belongs, and anything you say about a pit bull will trigger the conversational participants’ knowledge and feelings about not only pit bulls, but all the other members of the tree to which it belongs.  It would be fairly trivial programming-wise, although possibly quite tedious data-entry-wise to create a hypo-/hyper-nym tree for the couple-hundred-thousand or so words that make up the core vocabulary of English.  But to codify the various associations to all those words would be a lot more difficult.  Such a tree would be a step towards creating both a world-model and knowledge-base, aspects of artificial intelligence not explicitly related to the problem of machine translation.  That’s because humans use their whole brain when they use language, and so by default, they use more than just a bare set of grammar rules when parsing language and translating between one language and another.

One use of such a tree and its associations would be to distinguish between homographs or homonyms.  For example, if the computer sees a word it knows is associated with animals, it could work through the hypernym tree to see if “animal” is a hypernym or association with say, the word horse.  Or, if it sees the word “grain”, it could run through the trees of other words to see if they are farming/crop related or wood-related.  Or, perhaps, crossing language boundaries, if a language has one word that covers all senses of “ride”, and the other language distinguishes between riding in a car, or riding a horse, the program could use the trees to search for horse- or car-related words that might let it make a best guess one which verb is appropriate in a given context.

The long and short of the case I intend to make is that a true and accurate translation program cannot be written without taking enormous steps down the path of artificial intelligence.  A purely rule-based system, no matter how many epicycles are added to it, cannot be entirely accurate, because even a human being with native fluency in both languages and extensive knowledge and experience of translating cannot be entirely accurate.  Language is too malleable and allows too many equivalent forms to always allow for a single definitive translation of anything reasonably complex, and this is why it is necessary to make value judgements based on extra-linguistic data, which can only be comprehensively modeled by using techniques beyond pure grammatical rules.

 

In the next post, I’ll talk about statistical methods of machine translation, and hopefully I’ll be following that up with a critique and analysis of the spec fic concept of a universal translator.

 

The Translation Problem

One of the biggest problems in the field of artificial intelligence as it is popularly conceived is that of natural language processing and machine translation.  Natural language processing is the processing of human languages, generally in the form of text, but also as audio, by computers and software.  Machine translation is a form of natural language processing having to do with the translation of a text from one language into another by a computer.  Enormous strides have been made in natural language processing over the last two decades.  Text-to-speech, represented often by those annoying robotic phone calls, and speech-to-text such as dictation software, have both improved markedly.

But the big fish of natural language processing is still the universal translator, able to translate between any two given languages with high accuracy, perhaps even perfectly.  Which is, currently impossible, despite what people might tell you.  For example, Skype Translator looks great in the recent demo, but it’s doubtful it performs quite so well in the field.

There are actually several major issues that machine translation, and translation in general, have to tackle to achieve a high degree of accuracy.  Over the next few posts, I’m going to discuss what some of them are, why they are so difficult to solve, and possible ways they might be overcome.

To start with, there’s a very simple problem with most translation:  language has meaning on its own, but for human communication purposes, you have to know the context of the words you are trying to translate.  Most communication is not factual transmission of information.  Even in formal written prose, there are heaps of subtle ambiguities, and most humans can’t always pick up on every one, much less a poor dumb computer.  This is a problem not only when a word is used that has two different sense, such as a technical and a general sense.  Different languages divide up their semantic space differently, and a word that is a correct translation on paper may fail miserably in the real world.

To give an example, Japanese has pronouns just like English.  However, it does not have an exactly equivalent set.  The word for “her” in Japanese is “kanojo”.  But that word is rarely used, as most Japanese uses a name and an honorific instead.  Further complicating the situation, the word “kanojo” is also idiomatic for “girlfriend”.  The same goes for “kareshi” which is often translated as “he” on paper.   And then we have the various Japanese pronouns technically meaning “you”, or at least referring to the second person singular.  The main one given in teaching Japanese is “anata”.  However, much like “kanojo” or “kareshi” there is a sense of intimacy not immediately apparent in the use of this word.  It is often used between older married couples to mean something like “dear”, and is rarely if ever used as a bare second person, singular pronoun.  Rather, again, the person’s name and an honorific are used.  However, a great deal would have to be hard-coded into a piece of translation software to cover all of this, and that’s assuming there’s even enough context to make a decision at all.  Further, going into Japanese from English, would require the addition of formality information that a computer or even a human couldn’t always be sure of.

It’s often possible to translate conversation/survival language with bare, literal translations, because the basic sense is all that matters.  But more formal registers, or translation of a fixed text, would likely prove impossible for today’s machine translators and most humans, because there’s no way to convey all the necessary context that would provide information that in one language would not be included lexically or grammatically, but it all but necessary for appropriate communication in the other.

 

In the next post, I’ll be looking more at the ways language divide up their semantic space, and how that hinders accurate translation.

 

SpecLing #2: A Language Without Nouns?

Better late than never, I thought I’d talk today about the possibility of a language without nouns.  Last time, I talked about a language without verbs, and delved into what exactly defines a part of speech.  Here’s a quick recap:

1. Parts of speech can be defined in a few ways: lexically, where a given root is only acceptable as one part of speech; syntactically, where a their location in the sentence and the words surrounding them are applied to the root, and there may be no lexical distinction involved; and morphologically, where a category of roots undergo a specific set of morphological processes.
2. Nouns are content words, meaning they have a meaning that can exist independently of a sentence.
3. Verbs and noun roots in English can in fact switch categories.  You can bag your groceries by putting them in a bag, and rope you some cattle with a rope.

 

There have been several languages and language families put forward as lacking nouns.  Tongan, Riau Indonesian, the Salishan languages of Oregon.  In the case of Riau, it seems words are lexically underspecified–that is, they can be used in any category.  In Salishan languages, you have what is often considered to have a verbal category, while not having a nominal one.  So, the word for “dog” is actually a verb meaning “to be a dog”  The same goes for being a man.  One mans.

 

A question arises here:  While “man”-ness is a verb syntactically and morphologically in Salishan languages, is it possible to argue that these “verbs” aren’t just nouns by another form?  In the previous paragraph, I used the word “man” as a “verb” in English.  Are such verbs in Salishan merely placeholders for a true noun?  One difference in using verbs as opposed to nouns is the removal of the tedious “to be” constructions in English.  “He is a man.” requires more words than “He mans”.  That brings is back to the issue of the multiple definitions of a part of speech.  Lexically, its reasonable to say a language with such constructions lacks nouns.  Morphologically, if a root undergoes the same processes as words that are verbs, it’s reasonable to conclude it’s a verb.  The only argument to be had in this case is syntactic.  A predicate requires a verb.  If a Salishan pseudo-verb can be a predicate all on its own, then doesn’t that imply it’s actually a bona fide verb?  But verbs must be nominalized to become arguments of another verb, in which case you could argue they aren’t.  Now, the truth is that a noun/verb distinction has never been 100% delineable, so I think it can be argued in good faith that these roots are truly verbs.

In which case, it’s much simpler to conclude that we can have a language without nouns than that we can have a language without verbs.

 

As far as methods to construct a noun-less grammar, we have:

1. Stative verbs as in Salishan
2. I don’t know?  Any suggestions?

 

SpecLing #1: A Language Without Verbs?

This is the first in a series of posts on the subject of speculative linguistics, the study of language in a speculative context.  For example, studying constructed languages(conlangs), possible forms of alien communication, languages which violate earthly linguistic universals, etc.  Basically, it’s the application of real-world linguistics to non-real-world linguistic occurrences.

In this post, I’m going to talk about an interesting hypothetical situation involving a human-usable language without verbs.  I am going to get a bit technical, so to start I’ll give a short overview of the issues involved, and a refresher on some basic terms:

Parts of speech:  A verb is a part of speech, along with things like nouns, adjectives, adverbs, etc.  It is generally considered that all human languages have at least two parts of speech, verbs and nouns.  When linguistics study pidgins–contact languages developed by two groups who speak un-related languages–there are almost invariably nouns and verbs, the suggestion being that these two categories are required for human language.

Content words vs. function words:  Verbs, like nouns and adjectives, are “content words”.  That means they contain some inherent meaning.  Function words are things like prepositions and articles, which have a grammatical use, but don’t contain basic concepts like nouns and verbs do.

However, if you look at a verbs, you can see that they do in fact have some similar grammatical elements beyond the basic concept they represent.  Tense, mood, aspect, person, number, etc, are all functions of verbs in various languages.  You can abstract out these features into function words, and in fact some languages do.

Something else to consider is that most languages have a very restricted pool of function words, whereas they can usually contain any number of content words–one for every concept you can devise.  And yet not all languages have the same number or even a similar set of function words.  So the question becomes, could you, by expansion of the categories of function words of various types and with assistance from other content categories, split up the responsibilities of the verb category?

Each part of speech consists, in the most basic sense, of a set of responsibilities for the expression of thought.  The only difference between function words and content words is whether there are some higher concepts overlaid on top of those responsibilities.  Now, there are, to an extent, a finite number of responsibilities to be divided among the parts of speech in a language.  Not all languages have the same parts of speech, either.  This suggests that we can decide a priori how to divide out responsibilities, at least to an extent.  Assuming that a part of speech is merely a set of responsibilities, and knowing that these sets can vary in their reach from language to language, it is possible that we could divide the responsibilities between sets such that there is not part of speech sufficiently similar to the verb to allow for that classification.

Even that conclusion is assuming we’re restricted to similar categories as used by currently known human languages, or even just similar divisions of responsibility.  However, that isn’t necessarily the case.  There are, to my mind, two major ways to create a verb-less language:

1. Vestigial Verbs: As this is a topic and a challenge in language that has interested me for a long time, I’ve made several attempts at creating a verb-less language, and over time, I like to think they have gotten less crude.  One of my early efforts involved replacing verbs with a part of speech I called “relationals”.  They could be thought of as either verbs reduced to their essence, or atrophied over time into a few basic relationships between nouns.  Basically, they are a new part of speech replacing verbs with a slightly different responsibility set, but sharing a similar syntax, otherwise.  I was very much surpsied, then, while researching for this post, to come across a conlang by the name of Kēlen, created by Sylvia Sotomayor.  She also independently developed the idea of a relational, and even gave it the same name.  Great minds think alike?

Although our exact implementations differed, our ideas of a relational were surprisingly similar.  Basically, it’s what it says on the tin, it expresses a relationship between nouns(noun phrases).  However, they have features of verbs, such as valency–the number of arguments required by a verb, and Kelen included tense inflections, to represent time, although my own did not, and rather placed temporal responsibility on a noun-like construction representing a state of being.

An example of a relational, one that appears to be the basic relational for Sotomayor’s Kelen and my own conlang is that of “existence”.  In English we would use the verb “to be”: “there is a cat.”  Japanese has the two animacy-distinct verbs “iru” and “aru”: “Neko ga iru.”  Kelen makes use of the existential relational “la”: “la jacela” for “there is a bowl.”  In my conlang, the existential relational was mono-valent, somewhat equivalent to an intransitive verb, but Kelen can express almost any “to be” construction: “The bowl is red.”: “la jacēla janēla”, which takes a subject and a subject complement, and is thus bi-valent.  In English we have a separate category for these kind of verbs, “linking” verbs, as opposed to classifying them as transitive, but both categories are bi-valent, taking two arguments.

2. No Verbs: Another experiment of mine in a verb-less language took what I consider to be the second approach, which is to simply eliminate the verb class, and distribute its responsibilities among the other parts of speech.  Essentially, you get augmented nouns or an extra set of “adverbial” (though that’s an odd name considering there are no verbs, it’s the closest equivalent in standard part of speech) words/morphemes.  This requires thinking of “actions” differently, since we no longer have a class of words that explicitly describe actions.

My solution was to conceive of an action as a change in state.  So to carry the equivalent of a verbs information load, you have two static descriptions of a situation, and the meaning is carried by the contrast of the two states.  A simple, word-for-word gloss using English words for the verb “to melt” might be a juxtaposition of two states, one describing a solid form of the substance, and the other a liquid form: “past.ice present.water”.  There are all sorts of embellishments, such as a “manner” or “instrumental” clause that could be added: “past.ice present.water instrument.heat”, for example.  (The word after the period is the content word, and before is some grammatical construction expressing case or tense.)

 

There are probably many more methods of creating a verb-less language.  A relational language would probably be the easiest for the average person to learn, because of the similarity to a verbed language.  However, a statve language doesn’t seem impossible to use, and depending on the flexibility of morphology and syntax in regards to which responsibilities require completion in a given sentence, could be an effective if artificial method of human communication.

 

Next time, I’m going to consider the possibility of a noun-less language.  I’ve never tried one before, and honestly I don’t have high hopes for the concept.  Especially if it had normal verbs.  How would verb arguments be represented in a language without nouns?  Well, that’s really a question for the next post.

If anyone has some thoughts on the usability of a verb-less language, or the structure, or can recommend me some natlangs or conlangs that eschew verbs, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.