babies born knowing their native tongue a bit. vocabulary design. esperanto! <:

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2009/11/actung-baby-german-babies-say.html

In the latest study, Kathleen Wermke of the University of Würzburg in Germany and colleagues claim that the womb may also be where we learn to produce our first sounds. Wermke's team found that French newborns produced "rising" or low to high, contours of sound, whereas German newborns preferentially produced "falling", or high to low, contours.

The researchers write that these are "consistent with the intonation patterns observed in both of these languages", and conclude that these differences are in place so soon after birth that they must have been learned prenatally.

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D : well how about that.

My roomie and I just watched the first half of a documentary show called "The History of English". (Punctuation placement intended.)
This show portrays a language that very nearly never became what it is today.
It served certain political ends to get used, often in support of local rulers.
It absorbed vocabulary from many other tongues.
However, the basic stucture remained stable. This basic structure is reasonably easy to learn.
Again, suprasegmental aspects and function words remained highly resilient.

During the Renaissance, English generated vast amounts of new vocabulary from Greek and Latin sources. This resembled the method of Esperanto in passing.
Some words continue to be used, while others fell out of favour.
This leads to arbitrary incidents where the obvious opposite prefix cannot be used to generate the opposite word from the word core.
As much as one can praise English, a neat and concise core vocabulary is not such an aspect. It was described as nuanced and flexible and extensive.
I feel sorry for a new immigrant ESL student who gets to rote-memorize huge lexicon lists. I somehow doubt they use the word nuanced...

The Anglo-Saxon Germanic attempt to create a 'pure' English that was true to its roots is telling. Many new words were coined that involved compound words.
This reminded me a bit of PIE (proto indo european).
I think the PIE word for marriage literally means "give-heart".
Such an approach can complement thoughtful infix use for nuance, while retaining a fairly small core vocabulary to learn.
As Esperanto and Lojban have found out, a language needs a pretty extensive basic vocabulary to compound to generate more vocabulary.
If there are too few, the newly generated compound words are sufficiently vague to still require constant interpretation and clarification.
This is also true of infixes.

http://esperanto-usa.org/node/77

Esperanto lets you invent your own vocabulary

You can combine words, prefixes, and suffixes as you speak to make new words. In English, you can't just stick "un-" in front of the word "recommend" (unrecommend? disrecommend?). In Esperanto, if the opposite of a word ― a noun, a verb, an adjective ― makes sense, go ahead! Malrekomendi is perfectly good Esperanto. You want to really, really malrecommend something? Malrekomendegi! Every Esperanto speaker will get your point.
Esperanto has a recognizable vocabulary

You may have recognized several of the Esperanto words above, or seen related words in English (bona -> bonus, alta -> altitude, feliĉa -> felicitous). About 70% of Esperanto vocabulary is directly or indirectly derived from Latin roots, many of which also appear in English. Another major chunk is from Germanic roots (hundo, hound or dog). So you'll understand a good part of the words with little trouble.
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D: Latin/Germanic- claiming of particular ease to English on one hands, then claiming some mythical international character on the other...

http://www.freelang.net/dictionary/dic-lists.php

D: the English-to-Esperanto contains c. 17,000 items.

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http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090928115959AAM6Hh7

There are about 5000 official roots in Esperanto. You can find a hard-to-navigate list of all the official roots here: http://www.akueck.de/oleo.zip

D: but the extensive PIV dictionary has about 15,000 items.

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This is an appropriate place for me to say a few words about the material for the dictionary. Much earlier, when I had examined and rejected every non-essential from the grammar, I had desired to exercise the principles of economy in respect of the word-material also. Thinking that it was a matter of indifference what form any particular word took, so long as it was agreed that it should express a given idea, I simply invented words, taking care only that they should be as short as possible, and did not contain an unnecessary number of letters. Instead of using "interparoli" (to converse), a word of eleven letters, why should we not express the idea just as well by some word of two letters, say, "pa"? So I simply wrote the shortest and most easily pronounced mathematical series of conjoined letters, to each factor of which series I gave a certain meaning (e.g., a, ab, ac, ad, ba, ca, da . . .; e, eb, ec . . .; be, ce . . .; aba, aca . . . etc.).

But I immediately rejected this notion, for my own personal experiments proved that these invented words were very difficult to learn, and even more so to remember. I came to the conclusion that the material for the dictionary must be Romance-Teutonic, altered only so far as regularity and other important requirements of language demanded. Standing upon this ground, I soon observed that the present languages possessed an immense supply of words already international, with which all the nations had a prior acquaintance, and which formed a veritable treasure house for the future international language--and, of course, I utilised this treasure.

D: Zamenhof on his basic language design philosophy.
He rejects philosophical language tenets from the get-go.

There was much to lop, alter, correct, and radically to transform. Words and forms, principles and postulates, jostled with and opposed each other, whereas in theory, taken separately and not subjected to extended tests, they had appeared to me perfectly good. Such things, for instance, as the indeterminate preposition 'je,' the elastic verb 'meti,' the neutral termination 'aŭ,' etc, possibly would never have entered into my head if I had proceeded only upon theory. Some forms which had appeared to possess a wealth of advantage proved in practice to be nothing but useless ballast, and on this account I discarded several unnecessary suffixes.

D: but here is the price to pay for starting with such a hodgepodge...

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This problem I considered for a long while. At last the so-called secret alphabets, which do not necessitate any prior knowledge of them, and enable any person not in the secret to understand all that is written if you but transmit the key, gave me an idea. I arranged my language after the fashion of such a key, inserting not only the entire dictionary but also the whole grammar in the form of its separate elements. This key, entirely self-contained and alphabetically arranged, enabled anyone of any nationality to understand without further ado a letter written in Esperanto.

D: a concept I explore in HIOXian anatomical-based stylized pictograms - ideograms.
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D: Basic English by Ogden and derivatives claim a core vocabulary of about 1000 words.
Allowing for multi-word lexemes and generated compound words, this likely approaches 10,000. One can pay now (early) or later.
Less vocabulary core items, but more unclear and individually learned MWLs?
Any MWL that cannot be deconstructed and understood from its original commponents amounts to another basic vocabulary item that must be learned.
They often amount to idiom, which must be learned as 'part of the culture'.

I remain convinced that careful first design principles for both closed and open class words, with rules for both, could yield an unprecedentedly concise-but-flexible quality in a vocabulary.
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Reduplication

Reduplication is only marginally used in Esperanto. It has an intensivizing effect similar to that of the suffix -eg-. The common examples are plenplena (chock-full), from plena (full), finfine (finally, at last), from fina (final), and fojfoje (once in a while), from foje (once, sometimes). So far, reduplication has only been used with monosyllabic roots that don't require an epenthetic vowel when compounded.

D: You see a lot of reduplication in creoles.
It is often a way to differentiate two similar sounding words.
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Idioms

In addition to the root words and the rules for combining them, a learner of Esperanto must learn some idiomatic compounds that are not entirely straightforward. For example, eldoni, literally "to give out", means "to publish"; a vortaro, literally "a compilation of words", means "a glossary" or "a dictionary"; and necesejo, literally "a place for necessities", is a toilet. Almost all of these compounds, however, are modeled after equivalent compounds in native European languages: eldoni after the German herausgeben, and vortaro from the Russian словарь slovar'.

D: leading to the typical scenario of a tourist trying to find a toilet and desperately needing to pee, while trying to convey one's idea, LOL.

I guess that is no more ridiculous than folks asking for a bathroom - when there is no bath!
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D: in conclusion, a language designer should not shy away from a sufficiently extensive core vocabulary in the name of conciseness.
A language does need to be able to express concepts likely to be encountered in life.
At the same time, duplication and word redundancy ought to be minimized.
I suppose some overlap if preferable to gaps in the ability to express concepts.
Multiple ways to say the same thing will likely crop up from time to time.
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D: here I quote The Satanic Bible, er Ranto. <:

E2: Clarity

These affixes are often baffling. In , "cigarette box", <-uj-> means "(bulk) container". But it also occurs in , "Sweden" (not "Swedish ghetto") and , "apple tree" (not "apple barrel").

D: how is that for clear? <:
The trouble is that Zamenhof emphasived largely the syllable and not the single phoneme.
Because of his Latinate word-generating approach, with all the limitations of a natural language, this was bound to happen.
Some various possible translation errors for the above example might be:
- apple box for apple tree
- swede box for Sweden.
- cigarette tree
- Swede... tree?
<: LOL!
There is no clear system to sort out a word segment that is part of the root/stem versus part of an infix, either suffix or prefix.

D: to me, the easiest way to avoid this quagmire is to have certain syllable formats dedicated to root/stem, while others clearly only modify the basic meaning.
Simply using word particles versus infixes also helps, and is of more use to a language speaker unused to much agglutination.

overfussy distinctions - all mean "to marry".
D: his criticism about clockwork methodology to generate vocabulary would also apply to a philosophical language, though there is likely less overlap and redundancy.
Nonetheless, some very odd and often useless hypothetical words could be spoken.

----
Zamenhof was if anything overzealous in this department, stuffing his "basic" wordlists with trivial distinctions such as "a kiss" versus "a noisy kiss", and so on; who asked for these?
F3: Simplicity

This is the inverse problem, overlooked by Zamenhof. Language learners want to be able to start communicating with as little rote learning of vocabulary as possible.

D: "a noisy kiss" seems to be an ideal time to use compounding versus coining a new core term. Like I said, "Z" was haphazard.
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G5: Elegance

Shoehorning words into this system can mangle them horribly.

<-a>
= "by marriage, bilious, repentant, ancient"

D: figuring out the origin and etymological meaning of such trunctations is impossible.
I think this aspect can be best understood as a reaction to the very brief Volapuk language.

----
"coffee" (near-globally ) becomes , etc.

D: My Japanese friend Hiroshi says something more like co-hay.
So I am not sure how internationa kafo is.
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D: A problem with Esperanto, given the lack of planning to carefully use certain syllable formats for certain language aspects, is not 'wordiness' but lengthiness.
By that I mean quite a few vowels, and a long time to say the word.
Hund- (dog root). Hundo- dog.
The temptation to tack on a whole new syllable for each nuance (grammatical element, verb tense) ensures this.
A latinate word generating system all but ensures this.
To some degree, any natural language basis would.
To be fair, hundo means dog, hundoy means dogs. Hundoyn is dogs dogs/object.
So after the initial -o syllable, additional nuance does NOT add syllables.

Philosophical and/or taxonomic IALs have problems.
Not THOSE problems though...

difference between English and Chinese dyslexia

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091012121333.htm

In contrast, the new findings show that developmental dyslexia in Chinese is really two disorders: a visuospatial deficit and a phonological disorder combined.

Siok and her colleague Li Hai Tan say the difference can be traced to the characteristics of the two languages. "In English, the alphabetic letters that form visual words are pronounceable, so access to the pronunciation of English words is made possible by using letter-to-sound conversion rules," Siok said. "Written Chinese maps graphic forms—i.e., characters—onto meanings; Chinese characters possess a number of intricate strokes packed into a square configuration, and their pronunciations must be memorized by rote. This characteristic suggests that a fine-grained visuospatial analysis must be performed by the visual system in order to activate the characters' phonological and semantic information.

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With respect to HIOXian:

HIOXian lacks "intricate strokes" and "fine-grained visuospatial" detail.
Any particular phoneme/phonete symbol is roughly comparable to the visual complexity of the Roman Alphabet.

I suppose the proposed scheme to colour-code stacked consonant clusters and vowels could encounter learning disabilities. However, that system is strictly optional.
Hmm, guess I hafta pick the colours for that with colour blindness in mind.
Enough males have it that it needs to be treated as the same seriousness as dyslexia.

To reiterate, HIOXian lacks any visual component for meaning smaller than a dash: -.
This means it can be read by ageing folk with visual problems, it can scan and copy easily without too much degradation, it is forgiving of errors.

I was looking at Omniglot.com. Visual English by Bell has many very fine swirls and flourishes that convey essential meaning. They would not display well on a computer monitor. They also are not easy to write quickly and neatly.
From the point of view of a typesetter, Visual English is handy, since like the Cree syllabary, the symbols are recycled by rotating by increments of 90 degrees.
This is not a concern of mine. I am concerned with computer typing on one hand, and cursive writing on the other.
Visual English also illustrates the struggle between incorporating elements into the core symbols versus using various after-the-fact diacritics, accents and even specialized additional characters. IPA also struggled with this design issue.

I'd like to point out that even without the up/down spacing of consonants/vowels, the symbols would still be clear to a literate end user. Don't quote me just yet, but I don't think any vowel symbol will correspond with a consonant symbol. In fact, I mean to plan ahead enough that there is no such confusion.
This makes the up/down spacing simply an additional redundant way to convey information.
For English, it would serve to faciliate learning HIOXian as well as to increase reading speed.
English has enough phonemes that they will not map onto HIOXian without use of accents to convey additional information. This should not be an issue for Decimese.
To avoid the need for diacritics for Decimese, I will need to incorporate such features as plosives, fricatives, glides and semi-liquids into the core character.
PB TD KG SZ FV, LRWY, H. AEIOU.
I think I could live with LRWY and H requiring diacritics.

thoughts on Hioxian

I have a coupla weeks off here, so have revisited the Hioxian letter system.

I had hoped to avoid use of diacritics as much as possible.
But the consonants likely require it.
Not for Decimese, with its very limited selection of phonemes.
But for English and others, yes.

I have a Mac right now and don't know how to save pics.

I have been playing with cursive writing with the Hioxian system.
I'd like to take my notes in it next fall, when I return to university for my thesis.

First of all, English requires that I flesh out the consonant diacritic system for the 40+ sounds in English, subject to particular dialect.
The vowel is the core of any syllable.
The diacritic for English vowels ought to show syllable stress.
This includes a combination of volume and duration in English.
However, it does not necessarily in other languages.

Plus for VERSE English, I wanted to also denote tone pitch. For Chinese too.

So we have an overlap of standards.
The colour-code system could work for a computer.
I.e. RGB - red green blue. If denoting both, say, duration and pitch on a vowel, perhaps it would include overlapped red and green on a bar segment. So it'd be a third colour derived from those two. Alternatively, a blue-yellow-red basis.

In computer font, the spacing is perfectly regular, like courier font.
This is important to indicate edge boundaries for characters.
I had pondered a more abstract system that always possesses the central lower 'trunk' or root bar segment, and assumed a front head facing for meaning.
But it resulted in some very arbitrary left/right meaning segments.
And so it ceased to be particularly intuitive.

-----------
It is generally an easy task to determine which way to read the hieroglyphs even if the meaning is not understood. Hieroglyphs with a definite front and back (for example, a human or animal) will generally face the beginning of the sentence, as well as being oriented in the same direction as any large human or divine figure in the associated art work. (However, in some instances, they will be reoriented out of respect to face any important personage, such as a king or deity.)

As an example, if a tableau contains a picture of a man seated and facing right, then all hieroglyphs written in text above or behind the man, and having a definite front and back, would be oriented to the right as well. The actual hieroglyphs would be read from right-to-left because these images almost always face the beginning of the sentence. (Text written in front of the man might very well be oriented to the left, facing the man out of respect.)
----------

In cursive HIOXian, the rounded slant of characters could help show boundaries.
Since the actual shapes of phonemes are fairly limited, seeing boundaries should be fairly clear with this aid.
What I'd REALLY like to do is portray anatomical speech mechanisms in such a way that the character is always whole and continuous, without breaks.
This may be possible, but will take much WORK.
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http://www.geocities.com/dinosnider666/anatomical_phonetic_font.html

I cannot believe it but geocities is shutting down.
For that reason, I'll just cut 'n paste this website here.

--------------

Hi. Many fine attempts at a more phonetic alphabet have been made. For typesetting on obsolete printing presses, Bell's Visible Speech is excellent. It uses Cree syllabary-style of figures rotating 90, 180 and 270 degrees. It shows symmetrical pairs, like voiced/unvoiced very well.
Ygyde's alphabet bears a similarity to various short-hand writing schemes. It is fairly intuitive, and is well suited to handwriting.

However, I wished to make a system even more transparent, as well one optimized for computer displays. After a coupla years of fooling around with ideas, I have tentatively settled on Hioxian. The name is a reference to "HIOX", or the 16-segment alphanumeric font of calculator and early display fame.
A computer font requires particular qualities to be optimal. Thin lines and decorative flourishes are to be avoided. Bars should be medium thick for visual clarity. The only angles should be 45 degrees, so the pixels appear smooth. Leaning and curved characters are to be avoided. These requirements made me select the HIOX character, but not angled, and square v.s. rectangular. The remaining space thus freed up is then reserved for an optional diacritic of similar motif. In a pinch, the use of an old calculator display with the decimal indicating vowels as opposed to consonants can work.

Reading speed is increased by methodically using a mechanism that the Roman alphabet uses only sporadically and not at all methodically. Some letters are higher such as klh. Some are lower, such as gjp. Most are centered like aeiou. Wouldn't a system where character height always means something be nice? This would both increase comprehension and reading speed. In my case, vowels occupy the bottom 2/3 square of a rectangular space, and consonants the top 2/3.
Small particles resembling periods and commas are to be avoided, since they are difficult to read in small font, for those with vision problems, and do not scan/copy legibly.

Making a system more intuitive than Visible Speech was not easy. I fooled around with various systems. For the longest time I planned to use the 4 central segments that form a plus-sign shape as abstract phoneme-type indicators. However, I now wish use a stylized pictographic system, an ideographic one since it is highly stylized. Picture the human head from the side, facing left. For consonants, the top/bottom lips and teeth are left and center respectively. The nasal cavity is along the top. Air flow through the mouth would horizontal and bottom. Voice via the voice box would be bottom/right vertical. Vowels and consonants can indicate points of contact and tongue position via various diagonals.
A supplemental system for punctuation and numbers uses a similar motif. The punctuation characters are indicated with the left and right halves of letter and diacritic. The numbers and related concepts are indicated by using the top and bottom 1/3 diacritics sans a middle section. I may manage a 'visual arithmetic' system like Octomatics. A diacritic contains 5 (fairly) vertical and 2 horizontal segments apiece. Marking left to right for 1-5 and right to left for 6-10, we can indicate 1-10 and 1-10 in a single character space. Varying the horizontal segments could denote such concepts as whole number/fraction, square/root (powers), and metric prefixes for large and small.

Interestingly, for my spinoff project from Deafese called Mathese, or Decimese, I could map simple C-V form syllables onto the number system. This requires a limit of 10 possible consonants or vowels in any particular position. Or one of 20 consonant pairs, since only 1 of the pair is appropriate with Decimese's rules. Use of a binary counting system resembling Octomatics could possibly condense data even more.

We are left with a diacritic above vowels and below consonants respectively. I had intended to reserve the vowel diacritic tone in the pitch register system of VERSE. In Decimese, consonant clusters are severely restricted to C _+ LRW or Y + vowel. Recruiting the diacritic to indicate a LRWY consonant cluster leaves space to spare. English allows S + consonant plus LRWY in some cases. I had enough space left for, say, STR-. The word "strengths" is the ultimate test of capturing English consonant clusters. Notably, NG and TH are effectively digraphs. Conversely X and Q both represent compound consonants, in these case KS and KW respectively. A similar system could be used for adjacent vowels and diphthongs, since English lacks a tone system other than intonation in general.

I hope to explore using rainbow-style colour-coding to indicate multiple consonants or vowels stacked on one another for compactedness. For example, red could denote the first consonant. Blue could denote the second, but this could be purple where the 2 figures overlap in certain segments. And so on. In theory, the word "strengths" could be denoted as follows:
1) English: CCCVCCCCC
2) English/phonetically: CCCVCCC
3) using stacking (or my diacritic system): CVC. [=

Obviously, I need to hash out the entire system phoneme by phoneme. I then need to produce a complete downloadable font. I tested some sample Hioxian characters on my friends. They were guessing the sound before I could finish explaining it! <:
If things go well, perhaps I can design a system like IPA, but one that is easily understandable by the majority of normal people who are not linguists!

Cheers.
D.
March '08.
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Haha, hard to believe I was ever that ambitious.
Now I'd just be happy to successfully map the Decimese phonemes onto HIOXian!

Aside: I rewatched the Movie "Contact".
I remain intrigued by the potential offered with polarized displays to show more information embedded in otherwise flat 2D letters.
I suppose we could suggest syllable stress in a true 2D display simply by varying font size too.
I like the idea of additional information being optionally invisible in 2D.

My ultimate goal with HIOXian remains to supplant the Roman alphabet.
Aim high!
However, if it only serves as a complement to the Decimese language with its very limited phonemes and syllable choices then I will be content.

twitter kids coin new words

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/6116815/Twittering-teens-add-hundreds-of-words-to-dictionary.html

As youngsters spend more and more time chatting to their friends online, so they have tended to express themselves in language that mirrors everyday speech more closely.
...
Some words are contractions of expressions that have themselves only just become established online, most notably 'noob', for those who cannot be bothered to say – or more probably to write – 'newbie'.

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D: I guess the word for Avalon means apple too but originally meant all fruit in Celtic.
I'm watching a TV series on the history of English and its evolution.
It is the structure and not the vocabulary that carried it through.
Cultural dominance can be indicated by metronyms.
The French contributed fruit, which displaced avalon. Avalon was demoted to a niche.

XML and embedding info in computer images

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090827082533.htm

"Such systems have typically required end users to use a manually developed ontology – a lexicon of predefined concepts used to assign machine-readable semantic meaning to information – and then train the software to correctly annotate different images.
...

The ImageNotion system strips away much of that complexity for the end user, combining semantic annotation with a variety of other technologies, from text mining and object recognition to face detection and face identification, in order to permit many more images to be accurately annotated with little or no user intervention."

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML

D: this bears some passing resemblance to Attempto/ACE, in that it attempts to restrict English language usage.
Leading to the usual quagmire of dozens, if not hundreds, of popular natural languages.
See the entry on EU costs for translation. And the UN - OMG!

what grade level are political speeches written at?

http://www.languagemonitor.com/news/obamas-acceptance-speech-at-9th-grade-level

Other speeches delivered during the convention ranged from grade levels of 10.5 to 6.4:

* 10.5 (Al Gore),
* 10.3 (Bill Clinton),
* 8.7 (Hillary Clinton)
* 8.0 (Michelle Obama)
* 6.4 (Joe Biden)

Two of the most important and popular speeches in American history, The Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech also registered at ninth grade levels (9.1 and 8.8 respectively).
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D: so one needs to speak at the level of basic literacy, not functional literacy.

So what are all those kids learning after that for?
They can watch TV. <:

The Laubach teaching method has a system of 5 levels.
Level 2 seems to be the inability to smoothly pronounce polysyllabic words without breaking them down.
http://www.laubach-on.ca/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Laubach

Frankly, this works well in Decimese with its basic CV- construction.

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http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/ProtoLanguage-Monosyllables.htm
Interesting.
Core concepts of one syllable words from ancient languages.
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D: I might be in a position to take weekdays off next month.
I'd use that to finish my Hioxian letter system and to develop the tier 1 of Decimese.
Tier 1 is strictly closed class function words.
Doesn't sound very hard, until one realizes I don't just make a clone of English.
Or any other attempt.
I attempt to incorporate the composite nature of many closed class words.
I harp mostly on pronouns, since they are the most obvious example.
As always, the whole language is derived from MELTS - math, ethics, logic, time, space.

-----------------
I'm reading "The God Delusion" right now.
I'd like a language that has optional overt indicators of literal/metaphor/spiritual/ a religous "truth".
Imagine if the ancients had that.
We'd know if we are looking at a parable or anecdote, for example.
History or myth.

brain treats living things discretely from non-living

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-08/uor-bis081309.php

For unknown reasons, the human brain distinctly separates the handling of images of living things from images of non-living things, processing each image type in a different area of the brain. For years, many scientists have assumed the brain segregated visual information in this manner to optimize processing the images themselves, but new research shows that even in people who have been blind since birth the brain still separates the concepts of living and non-living objects.

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D: I'd like to have indicators for
1) living and
2) human.

The above article might explain why pets are called he/she and not it.
I pointed out to a woman I know that I refer to pets as it.
Whether the dog is male or female does not matter to me.
A bitch or a curr are the same in how I interact with it.
The woman I spoke to has named her car, and it is masculine, LOL.

I found out the hard way that parents don't like their infant or toddler called it.
But they have no discernible gender, so I don't see what else I would call ... it.
Oops.

I propose for Decimese
1) default to "it" - third person, singular
2) option to indicate living
3) option to denote masculine/feminine, with neuter default.
4) option for human (perhaps sentient, to allow for AIs/aliens/transgenics? <;)
So "he" would be third person, singular, neuter with human, living, and masculine denoters.
He/dog would be same but without human.
He/car would be same but without human, living.
The same car could take the default "it" pronoun.

Unlike it/he/she, I want the root/stem of "it" to be clear in he or she.
I also want more potential detail with plural forms.
It/ it(s). He(s). Et al.
They doesn't indicate gender or living or anything else.

The key theme is optional overt indicators of details.