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Want a context-free language, easily parseable, with plenty of computer-driven tooling, without this irritating English ambiguity? Lojban is learnable today: https://mw.lojban.org/papri/la...

In all seriousness, it is mind-blowing to me that our tribe of computer scientists continue to expend so much effort deriving meaning from English utterances. If we only wanted to encode meaning in a computer-manageable way, we could have been doing it decades ago.

.u'i xu do tavla fo lo jbobau? .i jbobau ko!

https://mw.lojban.org/papri/la...

Lojban! http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Loj...

Esperanto? le mi varkiclaflo'i cu culno lo angila! You mean Lojban, I presume.

During the 19th century, most scientific discourse in the Western world was conducted in Latin. It's less like we've imported Latin loanwords and more like we've stapled large amounts of English into Latin text. Many other characteristics of scientific writing are also borrowed (or meant to accommodate) quirks of Latin; we almost exhaustively use the passive voice, for example, because there's no way to avoid giving a direct subject in English. (This may be bogus.)

The reason English borrows and preserves so many Latin plurals (and it's just the plurals! You don't have to worry about genitives or datives or anything!) is out of reverence to the original source language. Latin's contribution as a carrier of communications in the arts and sciences is incalculably vast, and by choosing to preserve parts of its traditions in their language, English scholars during the Renaissance were deliberately helping to preserve its memory. At the time, of course, it was in part just a case of everyone's favourite mega-creole being a linguistic pickpocket to fill in its own deficiencies, but the respect that Latin has commended since its official death some time in the fifth century is still awe-inspiring.

By the way, plurals in English have never been all that consistent. Originally formations like "man" to "men" were much more common. In fact, viewed in the long history of things, the -(e)s formation only gained predominance more recently. Most European languages have two or more ways to form plurals based on the noun's case, just like (and often derived from) Latin, and English is peculiar in how regularised it is. You can choose to think of this as "it could've been worse" if you wish, but on the flip side it makes poetry much more difficult than in any other language.

If you're still really so upset about irregularities in language, though, you can always try Lojban or Esperanto.

Using Lojban as a language in legal documents to get rid of the conflicting and opaque language would be great but then everyone would need to learn Lojban. At least it would be easier than to learn understand legalese :) FYI Lojban is a constructed language designed to be logical and unambiguous. I've just started to learn it and it seems great so far. You can check http://www.lojban.org/ if you are interested.

Also in terms of programming a big problem is that of ambiguity. Compilers can't handle it, their syntax and grammar is rigidly defined, as it must be. That's the reason we have programming languages rather than simply programming in a natural language: Natural language is too imprecise, a computer cannot parse it. We need a more rigidly defined language.

Logban disagrees with this, insofar as it is concerned with itself.

Or whole world can start using lojban ( http://www.lojban.org/ ) to communicate with computers.

No parsing problem there, the language was basically developped to be recognized (and understood) easily by computers (and humans) and be without homonyms, irregularities and other stuff.

They'd switch to Loglan.

...Actually, they'd make trivial, incompatible changes to the language and call it Microsoft Loglan.

Meanwhile, FSF would promote Lojban, the free alternative that forked back in 1987. Many flame wars would ensue.

.uu mi badri

Every programmer should have to learn Lojban.

I have a present for you.

Oh, ok. I agree, I do get tired of people attaching extra meaning to the term, Free Software, and then expecting everyone to see how it follows. What you've said makes sense now.

I like the term 'freed' software as well, although it might imply to some people that said software was at one time non-free.

Lojban, anyone?

Yes, it does. They just happen to be the same as the male pronouns.

Stop trying to live your life to the drum beat of political correctness.

Check out the language Lojban for just one way to do this.

Sorry, I followed that link and got sidetracked reading about Lojban.

Now I've used up the whole afternoon and I still don't know anything about AJAX. :-/

I'm OK with the linguists trying to mothball those old languages for the sake of knowledge and history.

But the priority for a universal understanding should be to teach new generations a logical language instead of trying to keep these alive.

There are practical advantages in problem solving which have been tied to the language used in mental formulation, for example the development of what is metaphorically called "logical circuitry" has been shown to diverge between native English and Mandarin Chinese speakers.

My expectation is that spoken language will eventually go the way of handwriting: creature comfort, dying art, what once defined the best of us but becomes in many cases an indulgent inefficiency. How?

Anybody who dares to at this point, has realized they can jam wires into the human brain and let it learn to control machines on the other end. It's already beyond that in fact, with embedded communication devices being the next step, stepping shoe now currently in air: you'll see in a few days in Nature how real the "Neurochip" already is.

People should stop pretending this is about helping paraplegics by playing Space Invaders or moving a cursor with mind control, or that we're only trying to help brain injury, stroke, or paralysis patients. This is about construction workers with better than human strength in their better than human limbs. We drive vehicles through obstacles on land at 10 times the speed human beings can run, and we fly vehicles at 800 times the speed we can biologically move ourselves. We are mentally capable of managing bodily abilities far beyond those with which we are born.

This is not only about helping the disabled, and it's not only about incredible speeds or strengths. It's also about perfectly able people who would rather control personal electronics with their thoughts than search for or decipher other remote control electronics. Personal electronics are going to be a lot more personal, too; these people will eventually prefer to have personal electronics embedded in their bodies and networked with their minds.

Don't worry about losing human language: we will only lose it when we'll be better off for it, when we communicate and think better without it. The translator here, with IBM and elsewhere is of course more narrowly focused, but with this we are converging on technological telepathy and obsoleting human language.

Human logic and good intentions have come at it from a more traditional, less technological direction, giving us Esperanto, Loglan, Lojban, etc. You've probably heard of only one of these, which you probably laughed at somebody for being Geek enough to know any of. Most of them have been great ideas and well executed, but despite inherent gains in efficiency or intellectual force they are nowhere near the markets and their returns depend on mass adoption. Technology is different, it's tied directly to markets and to private profiteering with immediate amplification of wealth among the wealthy. Human beings are not going to create a better enough language, soon enough, before we create a technology which in itself superior to all human language. BG

la lunra. If you're going to simply use the word "moon" from another language, why pick Spanish? You might as well use something more logical.

In the same vein as Esperanto, Lojban http://www.lojban.org/ is a culturally neutral, machine parsable (written in Lex/Yacc, see the website) artifical language.

It was originally designed to study the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesi s, but has since developed a rich following from computer scientists as a potential human-computer interface tool. Err, at least that's why THIS computer scientist is interested in it. ;-)

    -- /v\atthew

Conflating meaning was a more important idea, I think. Like what the current U.S. administration and corporations do. Just what is an insurgent, anyway?

Regular spelling doesn't necessarily mean creating homographs, but in the case of converting English over it would, barring truly radical change. Start fresh, why don'tcha?

There really is a lot of value to getting out from underneath all the confusion of homophones/homonyms and homographs, ambiguous sentence structures, exceptions and irregularities. We should not kick out the idea of a regular language because we have a knee-jerk sense of superiority afforded by our English skillz.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban
http://www.lojban.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=Hom e+Page&bl

        * Has a grammar that is based on predicate logic, and is capable of expressing complex logical constructs precisely.
        * Has no irregularities or ambiguities in spelling or grammar, so it can be easily parsed by computer.
        * Is designed to be as culturally neutral as possible.
        * Is simple to learn and use compared to many natural languages.
        * Possesses an intricate system for effectively communicating contextual emotion.

...is like bailing out the Titanic with a thimble. There's so much that doesn't make sense and so many special exceptions that making it fractionally saner in one respect seems like a totally pointless exercise.

Constructed languages like Lojban start from the ground up and actually make sense in how they are put together. For instance, in Lojban's case, it's audio-visually isomorphic and it has an unambiguous grammar - words are spelt phonetically and a computer can parse sentences into their constituent parts without having to understand what is being said. There's none of this "X flies like a X" nonsense. And tense is achieved with particles - you don't have to remember the different words "flew"/"flies/"will fly" to express the same concept in a different tense - you just remember the one word "vofli" and apply the same tense particle that you use for every other word.

Natural languages are like the spaghetti code database your PHB handed you out of nowhere. It's so fundamentally broken that fixing it makes no sense, it's better to start from scratch.

You're right in that substitutes for tone of voice and facial expressions are creeping into the language in the form of emoticons etc, but I wonder how long it will be before emoticons are considered to be a proper part of natural languages in the same way that normal punctuation is?

The constructed language Lojban takes this a step further, with attitudinal indicators that are the rough analogue of emoticons. For instance, .u'i in a sentence indicates that you are amused. However attitudinal indicators are actually a part of the language proper, and are even spoken out loud.

If the language used by a culture begins to be less capable of expressing intricate thoughts and emotions, it's not a change for the better.

Right, but is that really happening? Fact is, English has a metric ton of crap in it that just kind of accumulated over the years. Many of its spellings and rules are baroque, and as time goes by I'd expect people to take simplifying shortcuts. Insisting on correctness just because seems worthless to me, as it implies that English is somehow perfect and canonical. If the meaning and nuances are still clear then why not simplify?

I don't see any evidence in the Wired polemic that the changes are for the worse. Shortening words or phrases as the language adapts to realtime text based communication is no big deal, the meaning is preserved and only the syntax has changed. I don't see any evidence that jargon is inherantly bad - the site he links to considers "email" to be a geek jargon word. All the words there refer to some specific, concrete thing and are useful as a result. Just because he doesn't understand them doesn't make them bad.

I'm also not convinced that writing standards are worse because of technology. I know my standards of English have improved as the result of writing things online (yes, here too!). If it weren't for the 'net then I would write far less than I do currently. Just because some people have a poor standard of English shouldn't be blamed on the tools, rather, blame the fact that English is such a crappy language.

A simple language is the mark of a simple culture, which was Orwell's point.

Not necessarily. See Lojban for an example of a very expressive yet simple language.

Maybe it is time to pick a language that accurately transmit human emotions, or at least, better than English (and Spanish): lojban.

if we all spoke Lojban.

"ordinateur"

If you think English computerese is bad, wait until L'Académie have finished reinterpreting it. Literally translated, the word is "counter" or "sorting machine".

The advantage of the current system is that I can discuss computers with a Korean, Russian, Zimbabwian or Peruvian -- knowing none of those languages -- and they can discuss computers amongst themselves. It's a pity that such a complex, irregular laguange had to be the defacto default (I'd prefer something like Lojban) but English is already the defacto default. Our choices are to work with what we have, or spend a lot of effort ploughing it up and reinventing local words for something which is essentially non-local.

Or perhaps we can all start communicating in Lojban...

Can we please start writing this kind of stuff in Lojban http://www.lojban.org/ to remove these number magnitude misunderstandings?

Why not throw out the grammar and the dictionary as well, and just learn Lojban?

Perhaps as an intermediate language they'd be better off using lojban. It's aimed at removing ambiguity so it sounds ideal for the job, particularly for translating diplomatic stuff where ambiguity is a really bad thing....

There are attempts to program in a spoken language: for instance Lojban. It's an artificial, logical language to be spoken, but in which no ambiguosity can occur. It's easily parsed by a computer. So why not learn it, speak it, program in it?

(I must admit that I think the language is too artificial to be spoken but I haven't even worked through the tutorial. There are actually people who can speak it fluently!)

Hello,

You are experiencing the effect of ambiguity that is an inherent trait in the English language.

To learn a language that is unambiguous, please visit http://www.lojban.org/.

No, I think they meant burglarized, just like they said. It's perfectly good English on this side of the pond, as is "buglary". English has rules but they aren't always set in stone. If you want a language that makes perfect sense go check out Lojban, previously known as Loglan.

some more info here

here is wikipedia in Lojban

some more info here

here is wikipedia in Lojban

Known as LogLan in a previous incarnation.

Testing Sapir-Whorf was the initial reason that the artifical language 'Loglan' - now called 'Lojban' http://www.lojban.org/ was developed. Of course, it has evolved into an effort to create a language with limited ambiguity (which among other things would facilitate communication between humans and computers - however the whole question of ambiguity in language has become much more interesting than first thought.

So in essense this seem to support the Sappir-Worph hypothesis (http://venus.va.com.au/suggestion/sapir.html) that the language strongly affect our ability to think.
This makes one wonder if a another language would give us the ability to better reason about other things. Would we be smarter if we had a better language in which to think?
There is an artifical language called lojban (http://www.lojban.org/) based on predicate logic but which is meant to be used as other "real" languages (compare with eg. esperanto, interlingua and swahili). The question is, would native speakers of lojban be better a rational thought? As far as I know there are no native speakers of lojban but what would happend if I raised my (hypothethical) children to speak if from birth?
Mathias

No, no, Lojban !

It's Esperanto ^ 2.

And we'll type it on a FrogPad.

Interestingly enough, there's "nuntalyli'u", a version of Colossal Cave translated to Lojban.

> and the equivalent of SETI@home (which similarly, has some people looking for a Mate).

I had always wondered why people ran SETI@home; now I know: they have given up on mating fellow humans (Is their self esteem that low? Has obesity gotten that bad in America?) and are looking to find love with aliens, once we decrypt the personal ads they have been sending us via interstellar radio.

(I think ambiguous appositives like these are a good reason to switch to Lojban)

There is a site around which purports to look at this from a legal standpoint as opposed to our 'IANAL' standpoints. The author there has been making it clear for a while now that SCO's lawyers are making one ludicrous and unsustainable claim after another. David Boies (sp?) has taken this case on a 'percent if we win' basis but has also been making claims that led the author to wonder if he knew anything about law at all. A couple of weeks ago, the author commented that SCO's behaviour was so obviously suicidal that the only explanation was: they are running this for a third party. The third party in question being a large monopoly based in the northern Seattle area.

Leaving that site's analysis now: When SCO folds - as it soon will - this presumably means that they will be unable to meet the legal bills of the (for example) IBM and RedHat lawyers. SCO's strategy has to be to exist for as long as possible so that their company can be milked for all it is not even worth, and then run.

That is the SCO directors, their lawyers have made a very eloquent case for the adoption of Gowachin Law in real life. (sorry about that link, it was the best I could find).

Gowachin Law was a creation of the 'Dune' author, Frank Herbert, and appeared in several of his ConSentiency books. The losing lawyer is killed by the winning one. There are ill-defined rules where other participants - including judges who do not meet standards - can also be killed.

The whole idea is that the participants are personally responsible for their misdeeds. Gowachin law is not going to be adopted any time soon, but the current system has obviously failed in that this turkey has been allowed to run for so long.

Look here for further information. Bet Klingon can't match that, even if Shakespeare sounds better in the original Klingon version.

It's true, almost the whole world are polyglots. It has also been shown that children with more than one native toungue develops their language quicker and better than single-languaged children.

Also, I wouldn't want my descendants to be unable to read most of the literature of the world (translations suck).

While a lingua france is a good thing, there is every reason to keep other languages alive.

Actaully I'm friendly to the idea of a artificial language as a lingua franca, preferably one designed to be free of ambiguity and easy to process in a computer, such as lojban.

If you are looking for a logical language, you may want to check out lojban, which "is a carefully constructed spoken language designed in the hope of removing a large portion of the ambiguity from human communication."

Perl gives the programmer an extreeme amount of freedom of style which makes it a powerful language for the vetran programmer and a BAD BAD BAD choice for a newbie who has no concept of style, form and coding practice.

Sure, and English is a terrible first language for the newbie human -- everyone should start with Lojban, and only bother to learn other languages once they've got style, form, and speaking practice down. English gives the speaker an extreme amount of freedom of style....

There's actually a lot to be said for something that gets the job done for a newbie easily and quickly when they need the job done. If they find that something does that, they might use it again next time, and perhaps hone their skills as they do. Python is pretty decent at this for some learning styles, but for others, Perl's inherent flexiblity is a big win.

IMHO, the best way to implement a "universal" translator is using an intermediate language capable of expressing most, if not all, concepts.

Sounds a lot like Lojban to me. Check it out, an artificial language based on predicate calculus. Although I doubt that the list of "bridi"s could keep up with inevitable changes in society, it is an interesting approach.

One of the supposed purposes of Lojban is to create a language more ideal for communicating with humans.

I have followed Lojban for quite some time now and I think that it, or something like it, represents the future of human-computer voice interaction. It is parseable and phonetically spelled, making it very computer friendly.

This does not beat the problem you brought up about Joe User, but for someone whose profession depends upon interaction with computers, learning a new way of typing (dvorak), writing (Graffiti) or speaking (Lojban) is a small price to pay. It even lends itself more toward the model of Shadowrunish futures where computer professionals are almost a separate race. :-)