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Lojban is designed to be used by people in communication with each other, and possibly in the future with computers.

A language which has often been suggested for AI interaction is Lojban. It derives from Loglan, which was created to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (if, as the SWH states, language constrains the way people think, will people think more logically in a logical language?) but since then its possibilities for AI have been considered, because of its position as an unambiguous, computer-parseable language which was nevertheless designed for humans to use.

However, I think that any language which would be successful as an inter-language between natural languages would have to be decidedly illogical.

Because chinese

(a)has only a standardised written form, not spoken form

(b)that written form is especially annoying to represent digitally.

(c) it is a tonal language, and therefore not very easy to learn unless you have been raised from birth speaking it, since your brain won't have developed the requisite pitch analysis. There are many more non-tonal than tonal language speakers in the world, so standardising on a tonal language would place ALL of them at a disadvantage. It's easy for a tonal language speaker to go the other way though.

spanish:

(a) everyone would be spitting all over eachother. That's just the way the language is.

(b) It has bizarre gender constructions. Gendered nouns, again, are easy to learn from birth, but going from a non-gendered to a gendered language is difficult, since the brain's from-birth language database hasn't allocated a row for "gender".

(c) It has annoying verb tense constructions. In english, one can easily construct new tenses to deal with problems encountered when talking about time travel/relativity in physics. "He would have been going to do that last week". That's a pain in the ass in spanish. Hence, native spanish speakers have a much shakier grasp of the concept of time.

We should really standardise on conlang like lojban. Then everyone would be at a roughly equal disadvantage, the language would be totally sanely constructed, amenable to computer parsing, and representable as ascii.

...and isn't explaining B.C.E. as "before the Christian era" defeating the object? The reason I use BCE (before the common era) and CE (common era) instead of BC and AD is to remove the references to religious myth.
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mrBlond

If by real you mean a natural language, then I don't have any great suggestions, although I know that French is much more regular and has a smaller vocabulary.

On the other hand Lojban is a real language. Like esperanto, Lojban is regular (the rules of the language have no exceptions), but it has only 6 vowels, 12 consonants, and 3 semi-letters. Other benefits are an unambiguous grammer based on principles of logic, culturally neutral, simple to learn, and it uses phonetic spelling.

Christopher

The human-readable and computer-readable stuff, that is.

How? Lojban, a constructed language designed to be absolutely consistent and logical. You might know it in its earlier incarnation of Loglan, which was mentioned in passing as a language used for conversing with computers in Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress."

Certainly, you could structure a valid Lojban statement to be unreadable to computers, but it isn't that way by default. If you state things directly, the computer can extract useful information.

This is why I'm absolutely 100% certain that we'll all learn Lojban soon. Yup, there is no doubt in my mind. None at all...
[rolls eyes,whistles a little tune]
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Hehe, I have no argument that mice are required for playing first person shooters. The higher resolution the mouse the better!

I don't know that a mouse is essential for selecting things. Your specific example assumes using a Macintosh style file-manager application. I'm suggesting that we need to rethink both software UIs and hardware UIs. Perhaps file-managers only exist in the currently fashionable GUIs. Perhaps there are ways to select files that don't involve file globs or mouse-pointer-rectangles. I think the current UI model that we commonly called "desktop" is probably good for children and illiterates, but I suggest the desktop model actually impedes the activities of information workers. IT professionals could get their jobs done with or with a desktop operating system; let's have people examine what type of interfaces would be best for individual problem domains and put an end to the "one desktop gui" fits all non-sense.

I don't specifically attack keyboards, because they seem to be used, often in combination with other devices, by most UIs introduced to date. Mice on the other hand are very fashinable right now but aren't part of any UI except the desktop model. I'd be happy to be rid of the keyboard. Maybe I should just shut-up and start using my twiddler. ;-)

UIs could be a lot better if we all typed in Lojban instead of English. ;-)

Lojban doesn't focus on being easy for certain people (as someone else said, people who know English and one romance language) to learn - it instead focuses on making it possible to express ideas without them being constrained by the language. Other design features are audio-visual isomorphism (if you hear something in Lojban, you know exactly how it would be written) and that the grammar is never ambiguous, and thus can be parsed by a computer. (Not to say that the computer understands it - AI isn't nearly far enough along for that to work in any human language.)
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Obfuscated e-mail addresses won't stop sadistic 12-year-old ACs.

This is the curse of the non-dot-com domains: Always to be forgotten.

Everyone should learn Lojban. It is a language designed to be logical, clear, and easy to learn. There is no reason that the world should not pick a good language to standardize on.

I'm fairly sure I once heard of the idea of making a lojbanic syntax for Perl. This seems like quite a good idea, considering that lojban is designed to be unambiguous, and basically contains all the words that would be necessary for a programming language already. The result of this would be pronounceable Perl.
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No more e-mail address game - see my user info. Time for revenge.

Remember Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress? In it, computers were programmed using "Loglan", a "logical language". This was in fact inspired by the late James Cooke Brown's Loglan project, begun in 1955. Lojban (from the Lojban words for "logical" and "language", rather than the English ones) is an offshoot of the original Loglan project, and appears to be the more viable of the two. I just bought the book describing the grammar, The Complete Lojban Language, and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in languages. I'm just starting to learn the language, but I'm interested to see where it will lead me.

If you buy the book, I'd recommend buying it directly from The Logical Language Group, since you'll save money over the price Amazon charges (save about $6-8 with shipping), you'll probably get it sooner (that's where Amazon will get it from) and the authors get more money from the direct sale, since their wholesale cost to Amazon is less than the $39 they're charging directly... (They charged me $5 for shipping.)

Remember Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress? In it, computers were programmed using "Loglan", a "logical language". This was in fact inspired by the late James Cooke Brown's Loglan project, begun in 1955. Lojban (from the Lojban words for "logical" and "language", rather than the English ones) is an offshoot of the original Loglan project, and appears to be the more viable of the two. I just bought the book describing the grammar, The Complete Lojban Language, and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in languages. I'm just starting to learn the language, but I'm interested to see where it will lead me.

If you buy the book, I'd recommend buying it directly from The Logical Language Group, since you'll save money over the price Amazon charges (save about $6-8 with shipping), you'll probably get it sooner (that's where Amazon will get it from) and the authors get more money from the direct sale, since their wholesale cost to Amazon is less than the $39 they're charging directly... (They charged me $5 for shipping.)

Remember Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress? In it, computers were programmed using "Loglan", a "logical language". This was in fact inspired by the late James Cooke Brown's Loglan project, begun in 1955. Lojban (from the Lojban words for "logical" and "language", rather than the English ones) is an offshoot of the original Loglan project, and appears to be the more viable of the two. I just bought the book describing the grammar, The Complete Lojban Language, and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in languages. I'm just starting to learn the language, but I'm interested to see where it will lead me.

If you buy the book, I'd recommend buying it directly from The Logical Language Group, since you'll save money over the price Amazon charges (save about $6-8 with shipping), you'll probably get it sooner (that's where Amazon will get it from) and the authors get more money from the direct sale, since their wholesale cost to Amazon is less than the $39 they're charging directly... (They charged me $5 for shipping.)

The answer to this question is "very Little, but not none at all". Programming languages aren't really based on the English language - they are based on predicate logic. In predicate logic, you break down any statement into a relationship (sometimes an "action" relationship) between two entities with a set of qualifiers which often have defaults. For a thorough description of predicate logic, visit the Lojban site, where they have gone the other direction, creating a human language from predicate logic.

For those of you who just want a quick answer, we'll use the following example:

The processor saves the data to file X.

We have an obvious object, verb, subject, and prepositional phrase here. In predicate logic, this is broken down to the relationship (in this case, "to save") and the entities involved in this relationship (the processor and the data), with an instructional details. Japanese changes the ordering of subject, verb, etc., but they still have all of those structures.

This brings us to a possible lingual difference. In English, we have implied imperitives which obviate the use of a subject ("You Run!" is usually just "Run!"), which bleeds heavily into our use of programming languages, i.e. print("this stuff"), because we can assume that the processor is going to do the work. I couldn't tell you if this is a practice in all other languages. It is interesting that object oriented programming begins to blur this assumption with the implication that any of many objects might "do" something.

So the question is, what differences are there in the editing of predicate logic between languages?

Mythological Beast

There should be a special set of documentation (etched on plastic maybe) which explains basic mathematics, and defines a simple language. I suggest using something like lojban because it is designed to be logical. once the archeologists are able to read lojban pretty well, -then- give them instructions on what the disc is, and a basic instructional course in English or whatever language stuff is put on there in.

Also, making sure that the disc and all the documentation for it is visible is going to be especially hard. Whether or not the disc can survive 10000 years withour damage in a pristine room, well, the Egyptian tombs were thought to be secure too.

All in all, tohugh, it's a noble idea, and has gotten me thinking about what sort of pictograms would have to be used as the introduction; an entertaining puzzle.

AHHHH! I will never never never post without using "preview" again. The name of the hypothesis is the "sapir-whorf hypothesis" and the link should point to "http://www.lojban.org/files/papers/SW.BI B" Sorry everybody!

If you want a less bloated lanuguge than English, look no further than lojban. Developed in the second half of this century, lojban is both an attempt to create a "logical language" (it is so logical than machines can parse it) and also to test the famous , which states that: I. Structural differences between language systems will, in general, be paralleled by nonlinguistic cognitive differences, of an unspecified sort, in the native speakers of the two languages. II. The structure of anyone's native language strongly influences or fully determines the world-view he will acquire as he learns the language. III. The semantic systems of different languages vary without constraint. This language intregues me, I think that it could be very useful. Imagine if everyone spoke it... it would do wonders for man-machine interaction (being that it is easy to write interpreters...)

If you want a less bloated lanuguge than English, look no further than lojban. Developed in the second half of this century, lojban is both an attempt to create a "logical language" (it is so logical than machines can parse it) and also to test the famous , which states that: I. Structural differences between language systems will, in general, be paralleled by nonlinguistic cognitive differences, of an unspecified sort, in the native speakers of the two languages. II. The structure of anyone's native language strongly influences or fully determines the world-view he will acquire as he learns the language. III. The semantic systems of different languages vary without constraint. This language intregues me, I think that it could be very useful. Imagine if everyone spoke it... it would do wonders for man-machine interaction (being that it is easy to write interpreters...)

You're missing the entire point. Yes, everyone is forced to use the de facto standard. That's the entire point. This person is talking about a situation in which everyone must choose between a non-functional computer and a computer running Windows. That is not choice.

Why are you using TCP/IP? Is it because you chose that protocol based on technical merit? You are using TCP/IP because it is the standard, and you are forced to choose between it and nothing if you expect to communicate with the rest of the world. Given that we are FORCED to follow standards or be debilitated -- whether it's file formats or driving on the right-hand side of the road -- the standards should be set by someone with the public interest in mind. Not by Microsoft. If MS was able to obfuscate the SMB protocol enough that SAMBA could not reverse engineer it -- and they tried -- then no, you would not have choice. And if, as the original poster feared, every web site required ActiveX, no, you would not have choice. Because no matter how much responsibility you have for your choices, you can't choose the standards that other people use, and those are the ones you have to use too, if you want to communicate with them.

Don't believe me? Try speaking exclusively lojban for a month, because it's the technically superior choice of spoken/written language. See how much choice you really have over what standards you can use.

Fifth, redundancy is good for language. Logic is bad. The way we think is redundant and illogical. Language should follow this system also.

Various things like this have been tried. You might try looking at Lojban. Even if you don't think anything will work as an international language but English, or that anything will work as an international language at all, learn Lojban. It's a fascinating language and can really make you think and help you get a grip on some of the trickier aspects of language in general.

Lojban's grammar (not its semantics!) is unambiguous and computer-parseable. We (I'm also on the Lojban board, as well as being Assistant Director of the Klingon Language Institute; I get around) have a YACC-based parser that really will parse Lojban sentences, if they conform to the baselined grammar. Lojban's not strictly LALR(1), but is with a little pre-processing. Anyway, so its grammar is computer-understandable, and even the ambiguities in its semantics are at least well-understood. By which I mean that you (or a computer) can know where the ambiguities lie, and what's more you have ways of asking clearly for further clarification of them. Lojban even has a set of exclamations that just express emotion, so something like "Ouch!" translates without relying on someone else knowing how English speakers express pain.

There are some less well-known (to me and probably also to others, since I do try to keep up on these things) attempts in this vein. There are languages that were based on cataloguing all the various concepts to be expressed in a sort of Dewey Decimal System on steroids, with the hope that you could compartmentalize thought into neat nesting categories, and join them up with some mathematical glue. This goes all the way back to Francis Lodowyck's "Common Writing", published in 1647. There was one called... Lincos I think? I can't find my copy. I think that was it. It's more recent, very big on numbers and sets and mathematical notation and such.

In short, your idea isn't new... not necessarily bad, but not untried either.

Basic English is a headache and a half. It's about as tough as English, for a non-English-speaker: it has just about all the irregularities and plenty opaque idioms from English. And it's a pain for English-speakers too, who have to remember that 90% of their vocabulary is missing. So it's unnatural for them as well, when they have to remember they can't say "selfish" but must instead say "having no thought for others."

Basically, it suffers from just about all the deficiencies of English (as perceived by non-native speakers), including English's famously arcane spelling system, and also is a pain for the native-speakers!

Maybe that's good, at least it's fair... but if that's your logic, you might as well be fair and pick a language that's not native to anyone (or hardly anyone), like Lojban, Esperanto, Klingon, etc...

It is a very valid question to ask why RMS spends a seemingly inordinate amount of time and bile in his insistance that we use his terminology.

Language shapes thought. It's the Sapir-[Whorf] hypothesis, widely open to debate but worth considering.

Sumner

I've been waiting a long time for something like this!
Thanks, oznoid &co. - now i'm off to start a language model for Lojban!

try lojban:

www.lojban.org

I suggest lojban...

It is not likely that we will get good automatic translators until we have machine that a pass the Turning test with ease.

The UN here also reinventing the wheel her, there are many candidates for their purposes.

• Esperanto has a simple grammer and is easy to learn, since it was intended as a Internation Language. Esperanto is ambiguous, but people can handle ambiguity most of the time.
• For well defind nonamgigous languags there are a few Loglan and its desendant Lojban are two, unfortunatly Loglan was not designed to be easy to learn. Actuualy since it was to test the Whorf hypothesis the opposite is closer to being true.

What's all this about speech-recognition anyway? It will never be as effecient as using the keyboard anyway...
Have a look at Lojban for a neat approach to the problem of making a computer understand grammar..