The second improvisation challenge (part of The Power of Connection Course from Next Thought) is to select only 25 words to take with me as my new language, as I go into space on a mission to colonize a new planet. The challenge was to choose the words that my new language will consist of in only 10 minutes.
I knew this was not going to be easy as soon as I read the instructions but didn't realize how difficult it was going to be. We take language for granted and I am not particularly known for being succinct. :) .
One of the things that I kept thinking about is how some of the online spaces/tools force you to communicate in as short a form as possible. Sometimes it's a hard restriction by the space/tool itself, e.g. Twitter's 145 characters, and sometimes a restrictions created by the circumstances and general norms adopted by the users, like while you're communicating with a fellow player during a video game. However in those instances I usually still have a full language with hundreds of words to choose from, abbreviate, shorten, omit etc.
Any way, back to my new created language, for which I will have no one to blame except myself if it doesn't work for me in outer space, and how I selected it.
The words are:
need, food, help, bad, good, thanks, feel, cold, heat, why, how, when, come go, must, time, contact, earth, planet, new, old.
One of the main assumptions on my mind while frantically trying to find good useful words was "many things can be easily mimed". With that in mind, I find that some words I like and some I think could have been replaced by more versatile ones.
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