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This is a proposal for an engelangy alternative to Lojban's
UI/attitudinals, based on Plutchik's classification of human emotions.
I do not advocate that Lojban adopt this scheme, but rather put this
out there as a possible alternative for other incipient engelangs. In
this scheme there are four paired (polar opposite) 'basic' emotions:
joy || sadness
anticipation || surprise
anger || fear
disgust || trust
Each emotion may occur in varying intensities - Plutchik lists
three, from least to most intense:
serenity/joy/ecstasy || pensiveness/sadness/grief
interest/anticipation/vigilance || distraction/surprise/amazement
annoyance/anger/rage || apprehension/fear/terror
boredom/disgust/loathing || acceptance/trust/admiration
There are also secondary (or 'primary dyadic') emotions comprised of
two other (adjacent) emotions:
joy+trust = love || disgust+sadness = remorse
anticipation+joy = optimism || sadness+surprise = disapproval
anger+anticipation = aggressiveness || surprise+fear = awe
anger+disgust = contempt || fear+trust = submission
Since each of the basic emotions can conceptually be divided into
three, 'primary dyadic' emotions (composites of two primary emotions)
could potentially have nine 'flavors', eg: love1 = joy+trust, love2 =
serenity+acceptance, love3 = ecstasy+admiration, love4 =
joy+acceptance, love5 = joy+admiration, and so on.
(I realize that 'love', in particular, is a very complex set of
emotions & relations, and several other analyses of it exist online,
including a useful one that sees it as consisting of three components
- intimacy, passion & commitment)
At a minimum, one could encode the eight primary emotions as distinct
terms in an engelang along with some sort of indicators for
"high/medium/low degree", possibly also encoding the eight secondary
emotions (see below) with distinct terms (depending on how compact one
wishes to make the lg), and perhaps even allowing distinct terms for
the additional degrees of the eight primaries and the different
flavors of secondaries (to a maximum of 24 primary + 72 secondary
terms = 96 total).
Bfowol