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.-- Inyuki, May 13 2012 Lojban http://www.lojban.orgA 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/LoglanThe 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] Could you provide us with a Rosetta sample of Logish?-- Alterother, May 13 2012 It would require at least determining the most frequently used senses of each of the English words.-- Inyuki, May 13 2012 ^ 'nose' from 'knows' as it were.-- FlyingToaster, May 13 2012 It doesn't mean it would be distorted English. The "stripping down" would not be sound-based, it would be sense-based.
'nose' and 'knows' would still be completely distinct different words, whereas the word 'orange' would have only one sense.-- Inyuki, May 13 2012 Esperanto ?-- 8th of 7, May 13 2012 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.-- nineteenthly, May 13 2012 Ah, like Microsoft, then.-- 8th of 7, May 13 2012 Thought-provoking answer. I wonder if Windows comes in Esperanto.-- nineteenthly, May 13 2012 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.-- pocmloc, May 13 2012 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.-- Inyuki, May 13 2012 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.-- nineteenthly, May 14 2012 Pidgin is a legitimately established offshoot language. My uncle is fluent, having spent some time in Hawaii. Yaka'ai?-- Alterother, May 14 2012 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.
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).-- MechE, May 14 2012 Yes, the answer is Pidgin, but there are various pidgins, so you'd need to decide on one.-- nineteenthly, May 14 2012 I feel Logish should be based on Reverse Polish Notation-- AbsintheWithoutLeave, May 14 2012 Okay, I only knew of just the one. That is, I mean, "Ha'uai? Dere be mow ai'n Pidgin now?"-- Alterother, May 14 2012 What you want is obviously Newspeak.
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Simple, unambiguous, restricted vocabulary, all declensions are regular. And it makes Thoughtcrime impossible.-- 8th of 7, May 14 2012 A pointless suggestion -.-. –.- -.. use a better language than English as the lingua-franker of the internet!
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.-- j paul, May 14 2012 Entered your first paragraph into Google translate; to Basque then to Azerbaijani, then English. Output:
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.-- sqeaketh the wheel, May 15 2012 [beanangel]? Is that you?-- AusCan531, May 15 2012 for the Nth time, John Wilkins and the Philosophical Language...-- not_morrison_rm, May 17 2012 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.-- hippo, May 17 2012 Cymraeg Chubut.
Thank the stars.-- skinflaps, May 17 2012 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.
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.
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.-- scad mientist, May 17 2012 [scad mientist], thank you for finding out about "Controlled Natural Languages", they are nearly exactly what this idea is about!
Taking an existing controlled natural language, such as Attempto Controlled English, as the starting point wold bootstrap the whole process.
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.-- Inyuki, May 18 2012 Good luck. The English word WILL has about 44 different meanings. It's possibly the single most complex and diversely defined word in existence.
Similarly, the Afrikaans word LEKKER was many meanings... maybe 30.-- UnaBubba, May 18 2012 //WILL has about 44 different meanings.
That does seem a little unfair. Under a communist government 43 of those meaning would be redistributed to other, more alternatively-meaningly alienated words.
Up the revolution! Forward in All Directions! <puts on donkey jacket and looks for scrap wood for the oil drum brazier>-- not_morrison_rm, May 18 2012 [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.-- Inyuki, May 18 2012 random, halfbakery