[extropy-chat] FWD [SK] Re: i-language again

[Terry W. Colvin]

Terry W. Colvin wrote:

> Spike wrote,
> 
>>>Example, spike.  (1) picture of a railroad spike.
>>>(2) picture of a athletic shoe with cleats.
>>>(3) picture of graph with a sudden upturn.
>>>...
>>>(11) picture of Spike Jones the musician, etc... spike
> 
> 
> Interesting ideas, Spike!  Some comments:
> 
> Apple has almost done what you are describing with their AppleScript
> programming language.  It is very human-language like, in an attempt to make
> it readable and debuggable by casual users.  So you can code something like
> "Tell the application Word to find my document named Resume and then
> spellcheck it with dictionary English with option underlining on and then
> save results onto network disk named Server unless status of network disk
> named Server is off."  This almost looks like English.
> 
> But what is really interesting is that they tokenize these words to
> byte-code numbers.  A foreign-language speaker sharing a network disk and
> looking at the exact same script above would see their own language!

  Except the grammar probably wouldn't match up.  Germans'll find the 
verb at the completely wrong end of the sentence! ;) And how do you 
tokenize "the"? There are three versions of the word "the" in French 
("le", "la", and "les"), and the choice of which to use depends on the 
words they're associated with.  It's even worse in German (I think there 
are six).  Not to mention "you" ("tu" or "vous" in French, and the use 
of which depends not only on grammar but the social relationship between 
the conversants; and, again, even more options in German).

 > Each
> foreign speaker can read and edit the script in their own language, while
> all other viewers see their own native language instead.  I think this
> approach would be a great way to have language-independent documents.  For
> this, you would need to distinguish different (numbered meanings) as you
> suggested earlier.

  The trick is, language isn't just vocabulary.  Japanese has an entire 
class of words ("particles") which don't exist in English.  In Japanese, 
"I" is "watashi", and "am" is "desu", but "I am James" is not "Watashi 
desu James", it's "Watashi wa James desu" (which could be translated 
back to English as "I, with regard to, James am", since "wa" means that 
the proceeding word is the subject of the sentence).

  At a party recently someone was telling me an amusing story about her 
problems with speaking Japanese from a phrasebook. Japanese for "Where 
is the washroom?" is "Otearai wa doko desu ka?" ("Otearai" is 
"washroom").  So she figured "Where am I?" was "Watashi wa doko desu 
ka?". Unfortunately, no-one could answer that question for her, it just 
mystified them.  Then it turned out that the way to ask "Where am I?" in 
Japanese is to ask "Where is here?".  "Where am I?" comes across as 
"What is my place in the grand scheme of things?", and as she hadn't 
encountered up with a Buddhist priest in her questioning, no-one could 
answer her. ;)

  Not to mention that Japanese has many different words for "I". 
"Watashi" is for male or female in relatively polite company; "Atashi" 
is for women only, and slightly less formal.  "Boku" is for young or 
effeminate men. "Ore" is for touch, macho men. "Watakushi" is for women 
and is extremely formal.  There's even one that only the empreror is 
supposed to use.

> Internationally understood icons are not as easy as you think.  I researched
> this almost 15 years ago for some computer work.  Many icons make sense in
> one language, but not another.  

  Tokenized language is even worse.

> Many Asian cultures can almost read other Asian languages because many of
> the ideograms are similar.

  Not exactly.  Most Asian cultures don't use ideograms. (India, for 
example, does not).  Many Asian cultures were heavily influenced by 
China, though, and can therefore read Chinese.  But Japanese Kanji is 
somewhat different from Chinese Kanji, and have the kana thrown in as 
well. Japanese can generally read Chinese, but Chinese can't necessarily 
read Japanese because of the linguistic differences which required the 
introduction of the kana.

> These evolved from more primitive pictographs of
> the items represented.  It makes sense that various cultures would use
> similar icons.  But the spoken words for these similar icons are totally
> different in each language even in cases where the icons were identical.

  The only reason they use similar icons is because the icons are all 
decended from one Chinese source. Ideographic languages not descended 
from Chinese are not readable by the average Chinese reader.

  * Note: most of the linguistic stuff here is from memory, and I'm not 
fluent in these languages. The details may need some polishing.

-- 
James H.G. Redekop


-- 
"Only a zit on the wart on the heinie of progress." Copyright 1992, Frank Rice


Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1 at mindspring.com >
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