DotComma — a constrained-language game for writing in short, plain words

About DotComma

A constrained-language game — and the onboarding layer for a low-pressure bridge-language community.

DotComma teaches people to write within a small, shared vocabulary of short, plain words. That constraint is the point: it is practice for a future bridge language — a simple, low-friction layer that helps people communicate across English, Mandarin, Vietnamese and other language communities.

The bigger idea

DotComma aims for nothing less than what modern banking and cryptocurrency has already achieved for years. To contribute to universal human language using technology. In many ways currency is the original human language. Currency began with trade, with giving your daughter a lamb, or a seed. It is the language most firmly rooted in the ground--the home of potatoes, of silver, and of seed. (The other universal language rooted in physicality and the earth is arguably power, but we won't go there for now.)

Money took on a state wide form when technology granted us the modern bank. More recently, technology has afforded money a more universal form, in the likes of cryptocurrency.

The same story goes for the two most heavenly forms of language. The languages of mathematics and of art. This unlikely duo would at first seem far apart, but have become paradoxically intertwined the more they have become universal. This unlikely relationship was born in it's more modern form in the geometry and geometrically precise artifices made popular in classical times, be it with the Greeks, Arabians, Chinese or classical-era South Americans, and later, in these traditions respective Modern resurgences.

Contrary to money, which has its first roots in the earth, the primordial harkings of maths and art come from the sky. For maths, this came in the language of astrology and astronomy, with its angles, orbits, calendars and predictions. For art, it came first in the stories we told about the stars, planets, weather, and clouds. In both cases the developments were vastly mediated by technology, whether it be brushes, rulers, protractors, or the Klavier.

Both Money then, and Artifico-Mathemathics (or A/M, as we might refer to it), have been firmly established as universal "word games," and that through technology. But what of ordinary language, the branches and twigs, the rain droplets and sun rays, that span between.

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