Slashdot Mirror
The Future of SiLo's Language Library
i4u writes "Early this morning I had a chance to speak with Ase (pronounced 'Ace') Deliri, curator of SiLo, the world's first digital language library. At its core, SiLo is a mash of Wikipedia and Babelfish, an open database focused on facilitating real conversations with real people. 'If you have 800-1200 words in your vocabulary, you can carry on a daily conversation. That is what we are looking at. How do you get a conversation going?'"
If you have 800-1200 words in your vocabulary, you can carry on a daily conversation.
Vocabulary's great, but it's not enough. You also need to know something about how to put those words together. You need to know morphology and syntax.
ANUX -- A full Linux distribution... Up your ass!
See, this is how ignorant you are! ANUX is an IBM version of Unix!
Loser!
Alcohol!
Linux powers my anal vibrator you insensitive clod.
The porpoise of trolling is to waste other peoples time not your time you are doing something wrong. A good troll can do it in one phrase, a sentence tops. You sir suck.
donde esta la biblioteca
... I didn't remember having that many words. It was just enough to to boot the Linux kernel on my SPARC systems.
Toki Pona is a constructed language with only 120-odd words plus a ton of idiomatic compounds.
How do you get a conversation going?
That's easy: "asl?"
You only need five words to start a conversation:
"So, you come here often?"
Everything after that is all smiles and nods.
I think the secret to a universal translator is to have a single perfectly defined artificial language and then to work out how to convert your desired language into that. Because all the translator work is targeting a single fixed target you only have to translate each language once instead of English to Spanish, English to french, English to Arabic, french to English, french to Spanish, french to etc. When converting into your chosen language you also need to track what you know. Some languages have gender to words, some give the married status of women etc but others don't so that will be missing. You'll have to alter/mark the translations to declare when some aspect of the target language isn't known. The common language would be incredibly complex (superset of all languages), but since nobody would use it directly that wouldn't matter.
That's always a good conversation starter.
Are you the fabled...
JUNIS?
And of course, my hovercraft is full of eels.
Bob-acting, Tony-from, stole
In other words, case clitics like Japanese uses. But most languages' case clitics aren't as invariant as those of Japanese, where for example "acting" is -ga and polite past tense is always -mash'ta. One ordinarily has to memorize the different forms of "acting" for each different kind (plural, gender, declension class) of subject and the forms of "from" for each different kind of object, and the different forms of "stole" for each subject (at least plural) and conjugation class. For example, in English, "stole" has "strong" conjugation, which is Germanic-speak for changing the vowel to 'a' or 'o' to form the past tense instead of adding -ed.
Controlled English is probably referring to the subset of English that is a formal language developed at the University of Zurich.
Seems a bit naive to think that there is a single language called 'aborigine'.