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In the scenario for this language, in the future (22nd and 23rd centuries), humans use headsets called nrnods that allow for telepathic communication on a global scale. Since this essentially throws spoken language out the window, letters for different sounds likely aren't needed (correct me if I'm wrong), but the main foundation of this language is tone. This is sort of already seen in normal writing, with punctuation marks such as periods, exclamations point, and question marks, but this language has advanced to have symbols for all tones.

I'm kinda confused on how to structure this language beyond that. How else would a language developed for telepathic communication be structured?

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    It's also worth noting that if your characters are going to have extended conversations in this constructed language (presumably written-out, as you're depicting symbols), you're going to have to translate them to English anyway, so you're free to abstract the conversation away. Commented Jan 20 at 23:28
  • It sounds to me like you are saying that this "language" does not need to encode certain traditional information, perhaps that Fred is buying us pizza. Maybe I can send that scene to your mind. It does still need to communicate some information about how you and I think or feel about the scene? Perhaps that a) you did not hear Fred offer but Carla did; or that b) Fred isn't right now but he could; or that c) you expect we should expect this since you hardly need to repeat to me how Fred spoiled our tacos. Would you like to confirm whether this is the sort of thing you're asking? Commented Jan 21 at 5:56
  • For a literary treatment of telepathic communication but without explicitly constructing a language for that there is The demolished man by Alfred Bester. Here only a part of the society has telepathic abilities. Commented Jan 22 at 20:13
  • The problem with this idea is that written language would still need to be able to communicate certain fundamental concepts. Having a symbol for the tone “angry” won’t help you write down the actual content of a telepathic conversation, just the moods expressed during it. Although the written language, as you said, won’t correspond to the no-longer-extant speech, there still must be a written language; maybe something pictographic, kind of like Chinese. Commented Feb 18 at 22:44

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Obviously you have a lot of freedom here.

Can individuals control their telepathic sending? Or is it more like mind reading, and every mind is open to read? Can it be recorded directly?

In any way, information needs to be serialised in some way to be conveyed, no matter if it is a stream of speech, a stream of gestures (like in sign languages), or a stream of pictures, or a stream of somehow structured thoughts (not necessarily verbalised). It is clear that even a telepathic communication can be converted into a script to fix it for long time, it needed. Such a script is possibly complex (already Sign writing is).

A telepathic language will still have morphemes and syntax, and it will have "telems" (like phonemes in spoken languages or cheiremes in sign languages) as minimal units distinguishing meanings.

Some special areas where I aspect a telepathic language to be essentially different from spoken languages:

  • Deixis. English has just this and that, here and there in everyday speach. Sign languages already have much more possibilities to indicate where something is or happens, and I expect telepathic languages to distinguish arbitrary many places and use them consistently.
  • Tense. Languages often (but not necessarily) have grammatical tenses. I expect that telepathic languages don't have tenses in the classical sense since every thought in the mind, no matter if planning the future or remembering the past or retrieving a fact is just present.
  • Evidentiality. We all have some feeling how true some information is. I expect telepathic languages to communicate this. The feature is not unknown to spoken languages, but largely absent from English (of course, one can give such information, but it is not compulsory encoded in this language).
  • Polyphony. In the mind, many thoughts are present at the same time. Maybe your telepathy language has some devices for that, like polyphony in Western music. A writing system can resemble a partitur for music.
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Sir Cornflake's answer is spot-on. Your telepathic language would still need elements that distinguish meanings (as phonemes, cheremes, and graphemes do in speech, signing, and writing respectively). Your telepathic language would still need a lexicon and a grammar. Don't forget that, in addition to being able to express and understand language, using language internally is one of our thinking skills. So ... I don't see any reason for a telepathic language to confine itself to the use of tones.

As I see it, the chief advantage of a telepathic language would be the ability to integrate language with sensory data--visual, aural, tactile, somatic, gustatory, olfactory ... "images" from all the senses. The language could have a system of deixis that us non-telepaths would find unfamiliar--a system by which the telepaths could use their language to organize and integrate sensory data into their discourse. One could imagine it as a kind of 3-D to 4-D rebus. "Yesterday, I saw a [image of man located among memories of a certain time and place]." "[image of a buffalo located among memories of a certain time and place] struck me as majestic."

I don't know about the written form of the language. It would probably need many descriptors that would be obviated by the images embedded in most linguistic telepathic messages. But a civilization advanced enough to create practical radio-telepathy would also be advanced enough to create a way to record the language and the embedded images just as written Internet text can be full of hyperlinks.

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    I love the comparison with a hypertext with embedded links. Commented Feb 7 at 14:02

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