🚀 go-pugleaf

>>>>> "Stefan" == Stefan MUEHLBACHER <SMuehlba@frequentis.com> writes:

    Stefan> I agree that a universial language would simplify the
    Stefan> translation from one natural language into another.

True, provided that the intermediate language can capture the ideas of
the original text as faithfully  as possible (i.e. no insertion and no
omission of any information, including grammatical marked ones such as
gender, tense, case, mood, number, temporal aspect, etc).


    Stefan> But that universial language should have the additional
    Stefan> requirement that its symbols are unambigous and its syntax
    Stefan> is also unambigous.  A natural language normally does not
    Stefan> have this feature.

You  may  be interested  in  Lojban  (http://www.lojban.org/) for  its
unambiguous syntax.


    Stefan> So why must the universial language be WRITTEN? I think it
    Stefan> is much better to invent a universial knowledge or
    Stefan> language representation. This representation need not be
    Stefan> understood directly by anybody, it should be an abstract
    Stefan> representation that can be best handled by computers. 

Without anyone understanding it,  how would you expect the programmers
to implement and *debug* the programs?


    Stefan> It should also provide a management for its symbols to keep
    Stefan> them unambigous without predefining all of them.

Who manages them?  A machine, or a human being?  Does the manager need
to understand the representations directly?


    Stefan> The advantage of this would be: nobody has to learn a new
    Stefan> language, the translation into a natural language is just
    Stefan> a matter of symbol mapping and syntax.

Nobody?  Then  who tells the  computers how to translate  the internal
representations to a natural language?



    Stefan> Is there another reason why your universial language
    Stefan> should be 'written'?

Any  machine representation  can be  "written" down  on paper  using a
well-defined format.  On  the other hand, any written  langauge can be
encoded and  hence represented in a computer.   So, they're equivalent
in terms of expressiveness.  I  can't see any point in arguing whether
this universal language should be "written".



-- 
Lee Sau Dan                     $(0,X)wAV(B(Big5)                    ~{@nJX6X~}(HZ) 
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| http://www.cs.hku.hk/~sdlee                        e-mail: sdlee@cs.hku.hk |
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