In order to clarify exactly what a perfect language is, and how the Galisyin monks are going about their task, here is a translation of one of Kayi Klasperion's review articles on the subject. I've translated most of the Galisyin and Pelagian examples to ones from English and Earth to make it more readable.
Some people think a perfect language is one in which it is impossible to lie. That's absurd. Any language that lets you say "The sky is blue" and "The grass is green" must also let you say "The sky is green".
The only difference between a perfect language and a regular language is that a perfect language forces you to either lie or tell the truth. A regular language lets you say all sorts of meaningless blather that sounds important, that can even change the course of people's lives, without being true or false at all.
Let's take an example from politics. Someone says "The Democrats are crooks."
This sentence has perfect grammar, and it seems to make sense in a way that ridiculous phrases like "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" doesn't. But the sentence, as it stands, is neither true or false.
Does it mean all Democrats are crooks? If so, how likely is it that every single member of a party of tens of millions of people is a crook? Does it mean most Democrats are crooks? This encounters the same problem. Does it mean at least some Democrats are crooks? Given tens of millions of people, it's ridiculous to think that none of them are crooks, so this conveys no extra information.
And what does it mean by "crook", anyway? If a Democrat once went a few miles over the speed limit, does that make her a crook? What if she engaged in some complicated form of political corruption that was not technically illegal? We can look up police records and find out exactly how many Democrats have been convicted of felonies in the last year - is the sentence only true if that number is above a certain amount? If a certain percent of Democrats have been convicted of felonies, but a much higher percent of Republicans and independents were convicted of those same felonies, is the sentence still true?
This questions are futile attempts to explain the inexplicable. The sentence has no meaning. It is a verbal gambit trying to trick the listener into associating the concept of Democrat with the concept of criminality, in the hopes that the association will subconsciously stick. It's not a lie - there is a sort of honesty in lies that this sentence totally lacks. It's more of a language failure, a loophole in semantics that lets it fly under the radar.
And the problem is that when someone hears this sentence, they don't ignore it as meaningless. They answer with "No they're not!" or "No, all Republicans are crooks!" or "You only say that because you've been brainwashed" and start a debate which is impossible to settle even in principle. And these meaningless debates over meaningless statements shape not only people's opinions, but religions, cultures, governments, and lives.
A perfect language is one in which "All Democrats are crooks" and a host of similarly flawed propositions sound as confused and agrammatical as "Him goed two they're house" or "the of should chair" or "yarble garble".
In order to start designing a perfect language, we need to identify a comprehensive list of the sort of problems that cause language failure.
1. Missing quantifiers: "Democrats are crooks". Are all Democrats crooks, most Democrats crooks, or only a few Democrats crooks?
2. Nonprobabilistic statements. "God exists". Can you only say this sentence if you're 100% sure God exists? Can you say if if you're 90% sure? What about 51% sure? 20% sure?
3. Overly broad loaded terms. "You are a crook". Is it fair to say this to a murderer? A person who drove 2 mph above the speed limit? A political prisoner in jail for speaking out against a dictator?
4. Scope of metaphors. "The Democrats are like the Communists." This may be true in one limited domain (for example, they have broad support among poor people) but it implies that they may resemble them in other domains as well (being oppressive). A perfect language would limit its metaphors to the domain intended.
5. Failure to separate empirical statements from random personal opinion. "Gay people raise children poorly". Are there any statistics about how the children of gay people do in relation to criminality, school grades, mental disorders, and other usual measures of whether someone is being raised badly? In imperfect languages, it is possible to express strong opinions about the statement above without even considering the existence of evidence; in a perfect language, an assertion should immediately imply need for evidence.
6. Poor handling of comparisons. "Life in the United States is difficult." Compared to what? Life in other countries? Life in other first world countries? Life in the United States a generation ago? Being dead?
7. The passive voice. Classically, "Mistakes were made". Less classically "This beloved leader" - beloved by whom?
8. Inability to handle morality. English handles morality by categories "good" and "bad" and assigning objects to these categories, but doesn't explain standards for doing so - one can simply say, for example "Democracy is good so we should have more of it." A perfect language would include a built-in metaethics.
9. For that matter, non-instrumental "should" is a linguistic failure. "We should raise taxes". Well, whether we should or shouldn't raise taxes depends on who we are and what we want. "We should raise taxes if we want X" is closer to the mark.
10. Too many words with strong connotations. There is a conjugation game about this: "I have firm principles. You're stubborn. He's pig-headed." Or "I'm sensitive. You're emotional. He's melodramatic."
These ten examples are only the tip of the iceberg. Instead of going through more, I want to give an example of how a perfect language could outdo a normal language.
Let's say someone says "Gay people are bad at raising children."
A perfect language wouldn't allow this phrasing. You could still express a similar point, but it would have to be something like "I believe with >75% probability that on average children raised by gay people will do significantly worse academically and socially than children raised by straight people."
The first sentence is a suggestion to feel uncomfortable about gay people, which can only be countered by flinging names at the person involved. The second is an empirical statement to which the obvious response is to look up a study on whether children raised by gay parents get worse grades in school (or are more likely to go to jail, or what). If the study doesn't show what the speaker thinks it shows, he would retract the statement. There is no opportunity for unresolveable heated debate at all.
In the next few chapters, I will discuss first the role of a perfect language (would it exclude poetry? normal conversation?) and some beginning features of what a perfect language's grammar might look like.