From: Raymond G. Van De Walker (rgvandewalker@juno.com)
Date: Mon May 24 1999 - 00:09:32 MDT
On Fri, 21 May 1999 19:35:06 +1000 "O'Regan, Emlyn"
<Emlyn.ORegan@actew.com.au> writes:
<snip>
>Of course we are all already quite different, and we already have
>communication difficulties (!). I wonder how this will progress.
>
>What kinds of answers are there to these problems?
<snip>
>- Create universal communication formats, fundamental structures for
>ideas and thoughts, which could be interchanged and processed by
>anyone.
>Same drawbacks as normal language, but maybe with less chance of
>picking
>up miscommunication. Plus, I challenge anyone to describe such a
>format
>to any useful degree. Come on, you know you want to...
In translation systems there's this idea called a bridge language.
Basically, one avoids a combinatorial explosion of translators by
translating everything to and
from the bridge language. So, if there are 4 languages (or transhumans)
with a bridging system there would be 4 translation systems, rather than
6, with 100 transhumans, there would be 100, rather than 9,900, etc.
The optimal bridge language would be historical, so archiving would be
easy.
It would have a well-uinderstood grammar. It should be culturally
neutral, and
since we're gonna-be transhuman, we want to say smart things, so we want
it to be expressive.
Now at this point, there are three or four classic choices:
English, French, Esperanto, and Loglan.
English is good historically, but smacks of cultural imperialism to some
people, and
could have a better grammar. Spelling is grotesque. Expressivity is,
well, ok.
French has a wonderful history and grammar, (controlled by the Institute
Francaise), but, as it happens, I don't like it, even though I can read
it. For me, of course, this is conclusive. ;)
Esperanto is a good contender, and the EU automated translation
facilities use it as a culturally-neutral bridge language. It's also
easy to learn: Even a linguistically lazy (or impaired) person like me
could learn it in a less than a year. I had one friend who learned it in
a weekend (grr!) Also, if I don't propose this, I may be drawn and
quartered by Esperantists, who are, well, sometimes a little -militant-
about the language. The cultural icon for Esperantism is a green star,
by the way.
-Loglan was invented to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that people can
think better in a language that better expresses logic. IMHO Loglan is
the most perfectly expressive spoken language ever designed. Not the
best, just the most flexible, logical and unambiguous. It has a unique
humorous art: One can actually say absurdities such as "John is a short
word." That is, John, -the person-, is a short word. Also, one can
gleefully confuse nouns and verbs, which don't exist as such in the
language. It should therefore be great for bureaucratese, (which of
course is likely to be one of the first applications of transhuman
intelligence, if the government funds the experiments.)
1. it contains compoundable regular grammars for almost all common human
grammatic features in human languages, as well as all standard symbolic
logic. (e.g. quantifiers, conjunctions, time tenses, location tenses,
(absent in Indo-european languages, but common in american-indian
languages), complex modals like should, would, etc, etc. etc.,)
2. It makes minimal ontological assumptions (for example, time-tenses are
optional, unlike in English, and word-roles are -modifiable- unlike any
other language of which I've heard),
3. it is maximally recognizable: loglan 'predicates' are picked for
maximum recognizability in the five languages with the most speakers,
(e.g. "blanu" = "x is bluer than y" is a mixture of English "blue",
chinese "lan", etc),
4. It is culturally neutral, since it's all made up.
5. It is phonemically disambiguated. vowel-consonant order is in regular
patterns
that always fall into words even when the words are spoken without a
pause.
6. It is grammatically disambiguated. They used YACC (yet another
compiler compiler, a UNIX utility for making machine parsers) to find
problems.
7. It is perfectly regular, which increases learnability, and decreases
effort.
I love loglan, I wouldn't mind Esperanto or English. If I had to, I'd
use French.
But hey, as transhumans, we could probably learn all four in a trice,
right? Why
not add Mandarin, as well, and get access to the largest language block,
and an ancient history, as well?
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