How many religious symbols can you really find on gift-wrapping anyway? Remember that Christmas trees are not particularly Christian; they're a pagan survival, and here in predominantly Muslim Turkey you can see loads of them put up for New Year celebrations. Angels? Found in several religions. Yule logs? Decidedly pagan. Holly? Super-pagan. Snowmen? Just plain weird.
Nice to see Lojban get a mention. I think in the long-term it has prospects as a kind of international "geek-speak" for the following reasons: - It is about as unambiguous as you can get, making it suitable for machine translation and AI work (there is already a working parser-glosser, and it has YACC and BNF machine grammars). - It's very easy to create new terms from a limited number of root words, e.g. "samske" (computer science); "samru'e" (currently executing program). - It's about as culturally neutral as you can get. In particular, it doesn't rely on culturally specific metaphors (try explaining to a non-native English speaker why you run up a debt but run out of milk!). - Basing the grammar on predicate logic makes it convenient for human-machine interaction (you can think of it as a kind of spoken Prolog). However, I think it will be a long way before it makes any impact on English as an international language.
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This is yet another case showing that you can get a patent for absolutely anything.
How many religious symbols can you really find on gift-wrapping anyway? Remember that Christmas trees are not particularly Christian; they're a pagan survival, and here in predominantly Muslim Turkey you can see loads of them put up for New Year celebrations. Angels? Found in several religions. Yule logs? Decidedly pagan. Holly? Super-pagan. Snowmen? Just plain weird.
Nice to see Lojban get a mention. I think in the long-term it has prospects as a kind of international "geek-speak" for the following reasons: - It is about as unambiguous as you can get, making it suitable for machine translation and AI work (there is already a working parser-glosser, and it has YACC and BNF machine grammars). - It's very easy to create new terms from a limited number of root words, e.g. "samske" (computer science); "samru'e" (currently executing program). - It's about as culturally neutral as you can get. In particular, it doesn't rely on culturally specific metaphors (try explaining to a non-native English speaker why you run up a debt but run out of milk!). - Basing the grammar on predicate logic makes it convenient for human-machine interaction (you can think of it as a kind of spoken Prolog). However, I think it will be a long way before it makes any impact on English as an international language.