[ExI] don't bother

[BillK]

On Fri, 7 Aug 2020 at 17:56, spike jones via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> The Japanese (and to some extent the Vietnamese) recognized that the whole notion of using hieroglyphics as a written language was a no-go, so they invented a form of their language which could be transmitted on a standard qwerty keyboard:
>
> Iki minangka conto saka ukara Jepang.
> They did it right: they made the spellings strictly phonetic.
>
> The Vietnamese argued there was no possible way to play their language thru a qwerty keyboard any more effectively than one can play rap thru a trombone.  But the tried, kinda:
>
> Đây là một ví dụ về một câu tiếng Nhật.
> Several of those Vietnamese characters aren’t available on the standard keyboard as far as I know, yet all the voting literature in this town comes in English, Mandarin and Vietnamese.  Used to have Spanish, but they dropped that.
>
> Clearly Vietnamese on a keyboard is a mess.  The Mandarin and Cantonese didn’t even bother trying.  They just learn English.  Kinda.
>
> Since Japan recognized that they needed to go international with their written language, it seems like they (and other languages) could invent a kind of simplified subset where all those terms for the same thing are collapsed down to one word and forget the social subtleties, don’t expect the round-eyes to master all that cultural stuff (don’t worry, we won’t.)
>
> Even English can be greatly simplified (once we get over the whole Newspeak implications (Orwell’s Newspeak concept really shoulda been introduced in a different book with a happy outcome (the concept, minus the political angle, is one of his great ideas))) and freely recognized as a specialized subset of language.
>
> Example, our verb “to be.”  We can express past, present and future tense with it, plurality and so forth, but that gives us 8 forms: be, being, been, am, is, are, was, were, and I mighta missed a couple, but what if… we could just accept that we sound a little like a teenage basketball star and use be for all of it?
>
> The goal: create a simplified Newspeak-ish vocabulary which has a simplified and formalized grammar, strictly phonetic spelling, unambiguously and rigorously defined terms, even if we need to accept clumsy and possibly harsh-sounding translations.
>
> Then we get other languages to meet in the middle and see what happens.
>
> I would be reluctant to even try to work with Japanese, having grown distrustful of everything my sushi chef taught me.  I would be introduced to my neighbor’s granddaughter, try to say hello, young lady, and have it come out: Greetings, promiscuous wench.
>
> I must admit the Google translate feature does a hell of a good job.
>
> There is a point to all this, a culture thing, to follow.
>
> spike
> _______________________________________________


Colloquialisms and context are a big problem for computer translation
programs. Word X = word Y just doesn't work in many cases. Google
translates  "go aisatsu, Amanojaku" as "Greetings, perverse person".
Which is a fair attempt at a conversational translation.  Between two
male American friends it might even be translated as "Hi, you little
devil", spoken with a smile. Human translators still have a job to do.  :)


BillK