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, 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.