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Logish
Logical English: A simplified version of English for writing web page content that is automatically translatable to other languages. | |
So, you want to write a blog, and want the whole world understand what you are writing? Write it in Logish, - the Logical English, which is composed of the same English words, albeit, each word works like a reserved word in a programming language, that is, it is stripped from all the alternative meanings*.
Logish also doesn't have the grammatical irregularities of ordinary English, since it is created through the same kind of process, that it took to create Lojban - an articial logical language, - making it possible to use it as a computational pivot language - a language, which is easy to translate from by application of simple rules.
Note: Lojban, a logical constructed language had been used for that purpose (see link). However, the advantage of using English as the basis, would be that the number of bilinguals who know English is many many orders of magnitude larger than the number of bilinguals who know Lojban. There is undoubtedly sufficiently large number of people in most cultural/linguistic backgrounds, who know English, are able to program, and know their mother tongue well enough, to be able to define and refine the rules of representing an unamiguously written text from Logish to their own languages.
People would understand Logish immediately, because Logish assigns to the reserved words the most frequently used senses of the English words.
*The alternative meanings could be gradually implemented as the new reserved words in the next version of the language and introduced as needed.
Lojban
http://www.lojban.org
A carefully constructed spoken language designed in the hope of removing a large portion of the ambiguity from human communication. [Inyuki, May 13 2012]
Fosay
https://code.google.com/p/fosay/
An interlingual machine translator written in Python 3.1 [Inyuki, May 13 2012]
LogLan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan
The original logical language, perhaps [Vernon, May 14 2012]
Newspeak
http://en.wikipedia....php?title=Newspeak
"Oldthinkers Unbellyfeel Ingsoc …" [8th of 7, May 14 2012]
Controlled Natural Languages
http://en.wikipedia...ed_natural_language
[scad mientist, May 17 2012]
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Annotation:
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Could you provide us with a Rosetta sample of Logish? |
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It would require at least determining the most frequently used senses of each of the English words. |
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^ 'nose' from 'knows' as it were. |
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It doesn't mean it would be distorted English. The "stripping down" would not be sound-based, it would be sense-based. |
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'nose' and 'knows' would still be completely distinct different words, whereas the word 'orange' would have only one sense. |
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Nope: Esperanto is very slightly a pile of crap for too
many reasons to bother mentioning, though it isn't
totally appalling - it doesn't even have the decency
to fail properly. |
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Ah, like Microsoft, then. |
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Thought-provoking answer. I wonder if Windows
comes in Esperanto. |
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I'm pretty sure Eco already discussed various language reforms of this exact type in "The Search for the Perfect Language". Goggle Bocks does not seem to have it at present. |
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Nope. Not Esperanto, not Lojban. Who of you would use it? It's not a constructued language, it's just an idea to start with the "subset" of well-defined English. |
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Well, there's Basic English, which restricts vocabulary to eight
hundred words, but there's also the issue of stripping out things
without knowing if they're useful or not, such as "the". There's
also Pidgin. |
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Pidgin is a legitimately established offshoot language. My
uncle is fluent, having spent some time in Hawaii. Yaka'ai? |
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So how far are you going to reduce meanings if the purpose is to provide direct translation, because it produces a significant problem in some instances. |
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For instance, are you going to combine blue and green into one word, since several languages don't distinguish between the two at all (Xanh, Vietnamese) or use one word for natural blue and green, but have another for artificial green (sheen/kesk, Kurdish). |
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Yes, the answer is Pidgin, but there are various pidgins, so you'd need to decide on one. |
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I feel Logish should be based on Reverse Polish Notation |
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Okay, I only knew of just the one. That is, I mean, "Ha'uai?
Dere be mow ai'n Pidgin now?" |
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What you want is obviously Newspeak. |
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Simple, unambiguous, restricted vocabulary,
all declensions are regular. And it makes
Thoughtcrime impossible. |
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A pointless suggestion -.-. –.- -.. use a better language than English as the lingua-franker of the internet! |
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Google are working on translation programs for quite a few languages, they are not perfect yet. if Inyuki types in his own normal language and gets google to translate, all he would need is a sympathetic audience who would accept that the mistakes are googles and not his. |
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Entered your first paragraph into Google translate; to Basque then to Azerbaijani, then English. Output: |
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So, you want to write a blog, you want to understand the world what you're writing? The same, but a programming language reserved words, each word, consider all the alternative meaning of * the same as that written, logical English, English words Logish. Since the logical language Lojban articial, this calculation can be used as pivot language, English grammar Logish ordinary violations, the same type of process, none of - the language, it is easy to translate the application of simple rules. |
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[beanangel]? Is that you? |
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for the Nth time, John Wilkins and the Philosophical Language... |
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There is a version of English, spoken by people who are learning English as a second language, which is commonly used as a 'lingua franca' and which works well as a simple and effective means of communication between people from different countries. The only downside is that it's actually quite hard for native English speakers to speak this form of English properly as they tend to keep using the long words, irregular verbs and complex constructions which are commonplace in 'native speaker' English. |
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I think what you are looking for is Controlled Natural Language (see link). There are quite a few of these to choose from (including Newspeak), so hopefully one of these will meet your needs without having to invent yet another one. |
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Since some of these are fairly widely used in technical writing, there are software tools to assist native English speakers in limiting themselves to the correct subset. |
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Perhaps one thing that could be added would be a language subtag to indicate when one of these standards is being used. For example tags can be used to specify United Kingdom or United States English as en-GB or en-US, so if there was a tag indicating that a standard controlled language was used that could help the browser/translator do a better job. |
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[scad mientist], thank you for finding out about "Controlled Natural Languages", they are nearly exactly what this idea is about! |
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Taking an existing controlled natural language, such as Attempto Controlled English, as the starting point wold bootstrap the whole process. |
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Your idea of tagging web pages written in such language, might be something what Google would love, considering their transition from information engine to knowledge engine. |
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Good luck. The English word WILL has about 44
different meanings. It's possibly the single most
complex and diversely defined word in existence. |
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Similarly, the Afrikaans word LEKKER was many
meanings... maybe 30. |
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//WILL has about 44 different meanings. |
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That does seem a little unfair. Under a communist government 43 of those meaning would be redistributed to other, more alternatively-meaningly alienated words. |
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Up the revolution! Forward in All Directions! <puts on donkey jacket and looks for scrap wood for the oil drum brazier> |
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[UnaBubba], but that doesn't prevent from disabling all the other meanings, only that we will have to devise other ways to access them - either implicitly through context-specific (but unambiguous) rules, or explicitly, by distributing those meanings to newly created words, or through syntactic means, like [NotationToby] had mentioned. |
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