Slashdot Mirror

(sorry, seems the GF was logged on in the browser I used last; this *is* the same poster)
 
If anything, it could be expected that a Quenya version of both Apple and Google were to surface as it has a bigger following.
Btw, for proper linkg, just use regular HTML <a href="...">-type links. HTH :)

My appologies

I seem to have experienced a brain fart. I do indeed live in the US, just a little east of NYC in fact, and I seem to have become disoriented when thinking where 668 would be in relation to 666. I'm not quite sure that I need to go through the multi-culti-thought-control-reprocessing though!

You seemed to have experienced a brain fart as well. (See below)

And may God^H^Hai have pity on your neurons!

Are slashdot'ers usually prone to brain farts on Fridays? :)

It is Friday, right????????

It seems like the problem here might be the helplessness of artificial intelligence in the face of natural stupidity.

Douglas Adams invented a word for this:

ABOYNE (vb.) To beat an expert at a game of skill by playing so appallingly that none of his clever tactics or strategies are of any use to him.

Note: William Quick coined the term on January 1, 2002, at 12:54 a.m in his Daily Pundit blog.

however, this result is from a quick & dirty google for "blogosphere etymology", and i have no info on the validity of the source

because sarchasm has the potential to be very large in a print medium, The Register proposes a solution.

Macromedia releasing...
a next-generation rich Internet application (RIA) development tool code-named Zorn

Hmm... "Zorn." Where have I heard that before?

Didn't "Zorn" mean "utter destruction" in the rabbit-language from Watership Down by Richard Adams?

'Zorn! Zorn!' cried the dreadful squealing voice. 'All dead! O Zorn!'

There's Ewok talk, there's Furby talk, there's primitive-people-who-can't-count-past-three talk...

And then there's Toki Pona.

Since I'm totally offtopic anyway... can Esperanto be considered wholly artificial if it bears simililarity to other languages? Why not teach 'em Solresol? ;-)

If you like languages, please check out these websites. If you're bored, check them out too... you might learn that you are interested in something new!

http://www.ancientscripts.com/
http://www.omniglot.com
http://www.langmaker.com/

A project to handle translations using Esperanto as an intermediary and archival language was started some years ago. It has had some interesting and useful partial successes, even without any official support to speak of.

To work well, the programmers writing the translation code did make a few tweaks to written Esperanto. This is to simplify the parsing task, and help in generating things required in the target language that aren't in Esperanto, as well as to clarify some of the few ambiguities in Esperanta syntax.

You can read about it at http://www.langmaker.com/db/mdl_esperantodedlt.htm if you're interested. (Needless to say, most of the site is in Esperanto. ;-)

well, my university (Aachen, Germany) requires me to display read-only capability in Latin, English and French. For the latter one I write a test today, concluding a six week intensive course. I expect to pass, but, here comes the twist: At the beginning I swore that if I passed, I would go learn Esperanto (which I consider interesting, but utterly useless :-). I also had ("had", because it's been a long time since I used it) some basic understanding of Klingon back when I was still running around in my uniform (no, I don't do that anymore. Grown-up, I guess. No, Ah! Stop the bashing! "Fire at Will!" :-) After that I guess I could finally learn Russian which I started a few years ago, because a good friend of mine is from St. Petersburg, but let slip because other things were more important... Japanese would be cool too... Jeesh, so many languages and so little time :-)

For those interested in ConLangs, BTW, I have these links:

www.langmaker.com

www.zompist.com/kit.html

These are of good use if you want to create your own languages for a novel, or a nice game of Caverns & Creatures :-)

Look at all those serious replies.
Guess they fell into the sarchasm.

Try this link for an artificially constructed language to see what I was referring to:

http://www.medianet.pl/~andrew/l/ebubo.htm

It's very regular, very logically designed, and a single mis-typed character can still yield a valid word -- no way of error detection (i.e. in English, I can type "the color bluu", "the color bleu", "the color "bluo", "the color blu", and people can probably guess what I mean. In Ebubo, "awa" (green) and "awe" (cyan) and "awi" "red" have no such distinctive differences. If I were to refer to the color "aw_", there is no way to guess what I was referring to.)

And of course, there's LogLan (i.e. LOGical LANguage).

For artifical languages in general:

http://www.langmaker.com/mlindex.htm

I can't off-hand find the paper which discusses the problem of artificial 'logical' languages having problems with error correction/noise, unfortunately. It's probably linked somewhere on langmaker.com, though, which is a fascinating site in itself.

Pika! Pika-pi! Pikachu!

I did say "human-experience-complete", didn't I? Saying "Pika-chu" is language is like saying "Woof-woof" is language. It's the cry of an animal, like "hoothoot" or "meowth".

[goes on to mention the South Park variant of the Smurf language]

So there's a demonstrative pronoun with wide application. It reminds me of my mom's dialect, which overuses th-words such as "this", "that", "there", and "thing", even when the listener is in the other room and cannot see the antecedent. But even worse: Here is a language spoken by fictional sea creatures with thousands of pronouns and no nouns.

The Summer Institute in Linguistics has a much more comprehensive list of languages in their compendium entitled the Ethnologue (Available for perusing online.

UNESCO, an agency of the United Nations has compiled The Redbook of Endangered Languages listing many endangered languages around the world.

Another source for those interested in endangered languages is The Foundation For Endangered Languages.

For those more interested in creating languages of their own, or "conlangs" like Tolkien created, might I suggest Langmaker, Mark Rosenfelder's excellent Virtual Verduria (including his Language Construction Kit), and for those interested in Tolkiens' tongues (such as Quenya, almost unanimously considered the most beautiful conlang created) there is the very informational Ardalambion.

Hope those links will help people interested in the topics of endangered and model languages.

algebraic notation is much easier for humans to comprehend than reverse polish notation

Not necessarily. Most English-like languages follow verb-object (VO) order (print x), but speakers of object-verb (OV) languages such as Japanese and Klingon tend to be more comfortable with programming languages that follow object-verb order (x print)

By the same token, infix notation (3 + 5) comes naturally only to those whose natural languages are infix, which includes most of Europe and the Americas. However, Irish and several Afroasiatic languages are prefix, which makes the (+ 3 5) syntax of Scheme more palatable, whereas Japanese is postfix (3 5 +) like Forth.

See also Fith

Actually, there was a successor to Forth called Fifth. Forth with OO extensions, IIRC.

Fith is a spoken language with a stack grammar. It's reported to be very hard for humans to speak in real time because humans seem to have a register architecture.

The true successor to forth is PostScript.

The smallest alphabet is that of Solresol, with 7. The "letters" (or segmental phonemes, if you're being picky) in Solresol may be represented in several ways, not just written, and it's fundamental to the language that they're all identical. It's often called a "musical language", because of their ancestry from the Western chromatic scale, but they have equally valid written and spoken forms, even to the tone deaf. Solresol is interesting for several reasons, although I'd not claim that it has a particular significant future.

• First wholly invented language to achieve any sort of widespread acceptance.
• First "interlangua", the notion of a translation intermediary language capable of expressing all other language translations x->y as the sequence of x->solresol and solresol->y.
• First language to formally separate semantics and encoding, i.e. the musical phoneme is exactly equivalent to the written phoneme (or that phoneme expressed in arranged pebbles, or smell-o-vision). As a result, it's entirely phonetic, but the distinction goes a long way beyond that.

And of course, it's in Unicode too.

On the downside, it's just French with squeaky noises.

Hawaiian is probably the "naturally evolved" human language with the shortest alphabet.

Forth is a postfix (reverse polish notation) language. So is PostScript. So is the HP calc language.

Postmodernist Obscurantism to make code as unreadable as possible!

Not all that unreadable to Fith speakers.