dabanese - a general introduction

Daba is the universal data base, which (potentially) contains all existing information. Dabanese is the language of daba. It is an international written language. The readers and writers of dabanese are called dabaers. For the children of the near future dabanese will be their first written language.

Dabaers can be nicely assisted by computers because computers can parse dabanese. Computers can help dabaers in many ways, to a dramatically greater extent than they can assist people in using natural languages.

Dabanese is in many ways a new Chinese language. It uses ideograms, called dabagrams, but dabanese is written from left to right, like the Western languages.

Once a dabagram is accepted by the official dabanese, it stays there, unaltered, forever. Actually, underneath each dabagram there is an invisible daba record. Daba records and dabagrams are partially ordered in a conceptual way, from the most general concept daba toward the more and more detailed notions.

The evolution of daba and dabanese is always backward compatible. The syntax of dabanese can only expand but it never changes otherwise. Once there is a dabagram or a dabatext or a daba record, they will exist forever, and a dabatext will be parsed forever in the same way. The meaning has to change over the time. There is no such thing as completely fixed meaning. The world changes, the people change, hence the notion of fixed meaning is meaningless. Nevertheless dabanese is more stable than natural languages - partly due to the stable syntax, and partly because you cannot drastically change a meaning of an existing phrase, as it happens in natural languages all the time. You can only introduce new dabaphrases and even new dabagrams. Potentially, there is an infinite supply of them.

I have described the main portion of the dabanese syntax in dabanese, 1.

Dabagrams will have their crude, legal format, and also artistic formats (fonts). At this moment I don't have proper software and graphics hence I will use pigeon dabagrams. The first (pigeon) dabagram is daba. It stands for everything. But the first two dabaphrases are:

{ }   and   ( )

where there is nothing (white space) between the parentheses. The meaning of these phrases is nothingness.

Dabaphrase { daba [ human ] } means almost the same as simply human, but it puts a stress on talking about all humans. On the other hand the dabaphrase { [ daba ] human } stands for everything which is related to humans (e.g. clothes, human emotions, science, poetry, sport, family life, friendships, ...). Indeed, this time the emphasis (brackets) is about daba, and the (pigeon) dabagram human only describes the daba in question.

The next ideogram is :=. It stands for definition. A relatively small number of dabagrams are primary, meaning that they are not defined by earlier dabagrams. The majority of dabagrams are introduced by macros, as follows:

( [ () ] := ( ) )

( [ {} ] := { } )

Thus from now on we do no need to use a whole phrase like ( ) or { } to mention nothingness - we may use one of the ideograms () or {}, without a white space between the parentheses. In general, the macro definition has the following syntax:

( [ newDabagram ] := defDabaphrase )

Once we insert this dabaphrase in our dabatext, the newDabagram will stand for defDabaphrase from then on.

The external paretheses above mean that the order of the components of our dabaphrase is important, while the order of subphrases inside braces is not essential. For instance, phrase

{ mother [ father ] }

stands for the grandfather on the maternal side, an so does the dabaphrase

{ [ father ] mother }

while

{ [ mother ] father }

stands for the grandmothher on the father side. On the other hand, phrase

( LA [ movement ] NY )

is ordered, it stands for a travel (or whatever movement) from LA to NY, while

(  LA { child [ movement ] }  [ John ]  )

perhaps tells us about a John, to whom a child moved from LA - due to the syntax of the phrase (the bold font is used only to make it easier on the eyes), the main emphasis is on John, he is the subject of the whole phrase; the emphasis on movement is not global but only local, within its subphrase

{ child [ movement ] }

A longer daba text may be still written as a single dabaphrase, for instance it may be an ordered list like this:

    (
        dabaphrase_1
        dabaphrase_2
            ...
        dabaphrase_55
    )

The first and last parenthesis indicate that the appearing order of the 55 subphrases is essential. If such a phrase is a bit expanded, like this:

  { Tuesday
    [ (
        dabaphrase_1
        dabaphrase_2
            ...
        dabaphrase_55
    ) ]
  }

then it describes what has happened on Tuesday (or what happens on Tuesdays), while dabaphrase:

  { { Tuesday [ task ] }
    [ (
        dabaphrase_1
        dabaphrase_2
            ...
        dabaphrase_55
    ) ]
  }

describes what has to be done on Tuesday(s).

dabanese, 2

As of the moment, I don't have any dabanese software nor graphics. Thus in this sequence of posts I will use dabanese pigeon ideograms. Potentially, any concatenation of unicode symbols which does not include any white space, and which is not one of the single symbols ( ) { } [ ], can possibly serve as a pigeon ideogram. We already have two pigeon ideograms: () and {} — they stand for "nothingness". I will also use English and Polish nouns, mathematical symbols, etc. It goes without saying that pigeon ideograms, and dabanese characters in general, have to be separated in a dabanese phrase by white spaces, when rendered without graphics (once we have graphics, each ideogram will reside in its own distinct rectangle).

Consider the following two dabaphrases:

{ coldness [ water ] }

{ [ coldness ] water }

Due to the different emphasis, the first phrase means "cold water", while the second one — "water-like coldness". Indeed, the emphasis tells you what the phrase is about. The first one is about water, the second one about coldness.

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In this dabaseries of notes I will deal mainly with the strict dabanese. In the day to day communication the unordered phrases (meaningful more so than lists) will be the most common. Thus it is convenient to introduce a practical shortcut: it is allowed to remove the external braces of the unordered phrase just inside the emphasis brackets, e.g. phrase

{ John [ { mother father } ] }

can be simplified to:

{ John [ mother father ] }

Here the emphasized subphrase is an unordered list. Most likely this phrase means "John's mother and father". By the way, the latter English phrase is slightly ambigous to those who don't know English well; to them it may mean "John's mother and someone's father" (or John's mother and a priest). In general, parsing of the natural languages is not unique while it is always unique for dabanese (which is a trivial theorem).

Polish noun for "movement" is short "ruch" (approximately pronounced roogh). Let's use it as a daba pigeon ideogram:

{ { [ ruch ] { foot foot } } [ Mary ] }

{ { [ North [ ruch ] ] { foot Friday } } [ Mary ] }

Yes, good graphics would help us a lot to parse dabanese phrases. Anyway, both phrases are about Mary ("Mary" is emphasized). The first phrase tells us that she is moving her feet (most likely her own, that's a natural default). Perhaps she's walking or running, or possibly she's sitting or even lying down and swinging her feet. More detailed meaning depends on the context (on other phrases of the longer text).

The second phrase is a bit more specific. It is concerned with a Mary, who is walking or running toward North on Friday (or on Fridays). Possibly she jogs to her friend most every Friday (and gets a ride home Saturday morning, who knows). To interpret this phrase as a one-foot movement wouild be possible but rather silly. As in natural languages, we get a lot of room for interpretation, and we rely on the common sense (not always succesfully).

One more example. Let =/= be the ideogram standing for "not equal". Let's also use Yr for "year". Then (we will use two lines to write one more complex phrase):

{  { { 2002 [ Yr ] } [ John ] }  { { 2007 [ Yr ] } [ John ] }
            [ =/= ]  }

is a way (perhaps clumsy) of saying that John from the year 2002 and from the 2007 year is not the same, that perhaps he has changed, or perhaps the phrase informs us that there are two different Johns. We may switch the emphasis from the change in John to John himself (this time there will be the same John, unless a symbolic John is meant, a John of all Johns):

{  { { 2002 [ Yr ] }  { { 2007 [ Yr ] }  [ =/= ] }  [ John ]  }

or more specifically:

{  { { 2002 [ Yr ] } { 2007 [ Yr ] } [ =/= ] }
            [ politics [ John ] ]  }

Now we are informed that John has changed politically between years 2002 and 2007 — possibly his views have changed, or his political affiliations, or ....

dabanese, 1

The syntax of the relaxed, as well as of the strict version of dabanese is simple. Initially we have the notion of an ideogram and of the six symbols which are not ideograms, namely three kind of paretheses: ( ) { } [ ]. Both the ideograms and the six symbols are called characters. Given a phrase or a sequence of phrases A₁ ... A_n (possibly empty, when n=0), we may use them to create new phrases as follows:

1. a single ideogram is a phrase; it is also a strict phrase;


2. if A is a phrase then [A] is a phrase — it is called an emphasized phrase; If left bracket symbol [ is not the first character of A, and if A is a strict phrase then also [A] is a strict phrase (in plain language: strict dabanese allows only a single emphasis);


3. if A₁ ... A_n is a finite sequence of dabanese phrases then the concatenation
   
   { A₁ ... A_n }
   which inserts the sequence between braces, is a dabanese phrase; it is called an unordered phrase, and A₁ ... A_n are its subphrases; if none of the subphrases is emphasized then the resulting phrase is called an unordered list; if all subphrases A₁ ... A_n are strict, and if not more than one of them is emphasized, then the resulting phrase is strict;


4. if A₁ ... A_n is a finite sequence of dabanese phrases then the concatenation
   
   ( A₁ ... A_n )
   which inserts the sequence between parentheses ( ), is a dabanese phrase; it is called an ordered phrase, and A₁ ... A_n are its subphrases; if none of the subphrases is emphasized then the resulting phrase is called an ordered list; if all subphrases A₁ ... A_n are strict, and if not more than one of them is emphasized, then the resulting phrase is strict;



5. every phrase (relaxed or strict) is obtained by a finite application of the above rules.

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Now remember that it took you a couple of years to learn your native language, and another couple of years to learn your next language, ... Thus please be patient and tolerate well the first dabanese phrases, after the empty (hence invisible) phrase:

( )

{ }

The meaning of the dabanese phrases depends on the society of the dabanese folks (called dabers), just like in the case of natural languages. I am a dabanese folk, and I claim that the meaning of both above dabanese phrases is "nothingness". The difference between the two is something of a joke to me, because we have here an ordered and an unordered nothingness, but it's really the same. Continuing along such amusing lines we may also consider phrases which are not easy on eyes (but I'll help the cause by using informally the bold case):

{ ( ) [ ( ) ] }

{ [ { } ] ( ) }

They mean something like "empty nothingness" or "nothingness which is nothing". To make them easier on our eyes let's introduce pigeon ideograms () and {} (no space between the parentheses or braces) which stand for the same as dabanese phrases ( ) and { }. Then we may rewrite the above two dabaphrases as:

( () [ () ] )

{ [ {} ] () }

We may say that emphasized phrases are meaningful, as opposed to phrases which are merely lists. Thus above two phrases are meaningful — silly but meaningful formally.

dabanese, 0

Dabanese is a written language, which can be read as you please. Chinese is like this too. It uses ideograms, meant in a very general sense, including all kind of common symbols, in particular mathematical symbols.

I was developing an early version of dabanese in 1985. Then a more mature version in year 2000. The present version has started not much after that.

Dabanese has a very simple syntax rather than grammar. I have recognized that the grammatical notions like nouns, verbs, adjectives, ... are not necessary, that one kind of ideograms is enough. They, and the subphrases, differ in a phrase due to the emphasis and position.

The name dabanese means the language of daba (like Chinese and Japanes are the languages of China and Japan respectively). The name daba stands for the universal data base, which is another story. Roughly speaking, dabanese is to daba what C is to unix.

Remark Until I develop software (graphics, parsers, ...), I'll use mainly the English and Polish nouns in place of ideograms in order to illustrate dabanese phrases.

We will see that dabanese phrases can be iterated, hence an entire chapter or even a monograph can be written as just one phrase. Certain devices and/or software will assist reading dabanese texts.