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A Universal Networking Language for the Internet?
Anonymous Coward writes: "The United Nations University is developing a
Universal Networking Language for the Internet, which is designed to allow effective communication between people writing in their native languages, with automatic conversion through an intermediate Meta-language (perhaps a precursor to Star Trek's Universal Translator.)
They will be holding a symposium on the technology on 18 November in Brussels, Belgium, where they will publicly announce their achievement. They claim that the initial stage of UNL will support 16 languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian,
Spanish, German, Hindi, Italian, Indonesian, Japanese, Latvian, Mongol, Portuguese, Swahili and Thai." An interesting idea, but this is one of those "the devil is in the details" things. It'll be interesting to see how/if this can work.
I'd think it would be difficult to make an abstracted meta-language out of human languages. There's lots of grammatical issues which would be particularly difficult to deal with well.
For example, in the case of inflected languages, how do you get the declensional case information into the metalanguage? In many languages, there are grammatical cases have overlapping declensions, so there's ambiguity about what would be intended with meaning. And mapping between languages would be really tough.
Verbs would be really tough. Like in Russian, you have three tenses (past, present, and future) as well as two verb aspects. So you have pairs of verbs, one expressing action that occurs once, the other expressing habitual activity.
Sounds like the project would be lots of fun to work on, though. It's a really neat idea, linguistically.
It's not going to work very well. The problem is that each language has its own nuances, and in many cases these don't translate very well into other languages. I'll use Japanese honorifics as an example. The list of them is relatively long ( -san, -sama, -kun, -chan, -sensei, -wa, and others). Simply by attaching one to the end of a person's name, I can make the same sentence express immoderate flattery or extreme derision. This can be translated in an extremely limited fashion to romance languages such as Spanish or French (by using familiar vs. formal form of address, but it's still limited). It doesn't translate into English at all (this is why I prefer subtitled anime; get the general meaning from the subtitles, and actually listen to the Japanese for the nuances). And, of course, you still have the problem of inflection not translating very well into written words. This makes English particularly unsuitable for network communications, actually, since so much meaning is left to inflection. What's the solution? I don't know. There probably isn't one. Even Esperanto isn't immune to this problem of losing meanings in translation. I don't think a "universal meta-language" is going to work, though.