Return-Path: Resent-From: cbmvax!uunet!PICA.ARMY.MIL!protin Resent-Message-Id: <9108071636.AA07941@relay1.UU.NET> 12 Oct 90 17:37 EDT Date: Fri, 12 Oct 90 12:09:27 -0700 From: Jeff Prothero Message-Id: <9010121909.AA24703@milton.u.washington.edu> To: lojban-list@snark.thyrsus.com Subject: Book review (long) Cc: jimc@math.ucla.edu Resent-Date: Wed, 7 Aug 91 12:32:32 EDT Resent-To: John Cowan Status: RO X-From-Space-Date: Wed Aug 7 14:28:40 1991 X-From-Space-Address: cbmvax!uunet!PICA.ARMY.MIL!protin I've been poking through the Linguistics section of the campus library, and found a book which might interest other Loglanists: Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs 42: Interlinguistics Aspects of the Science of Planned Languages Klaus Schubert (Ed.) Mouton de Gruyter 1989 ISBN 3-11-011910-2 The book is 350 pages, in print, and costs $45 in Seattle. "This book ... is an invitation to all those interested in languages and linguistics to make themselves acquainted with some recent streams of scientific discussion in the field of planned languages." The book is a collection of fifteen recent papers in interlinguistics. For folks who (like me) haven't been following the field, the bibliographies provide an up-to-date set of pointers into the literature, plus some overviews of it. I think the table of contents gives an adequate idea of the scope and focus of the book: -------------------------------------------------------------------- Table of contents: Part I: I Introductions Andre Martinet: The proof of the pudding Klaus Schubert: Interlinguistics - its aims, its achievements, and its place in language science. Part II: Planned Languages in Linguistics Aleksandr D Dulicenko: Ethnic language and planned language. Detlev Blanke: Planned languages - a survey of some of the main problems. Sergej N Kuznecov: Interlinguistics: a branch of applied linguistics? Part III: Languages Design and Language Change Dan Maxwell: Principles for constructing Planned Languages Francois Lo Jacomo: Optimization in language planning Claude Piron: A few notes on the evolution of Esperanto Part IV: Sociolinguistics and Psycholinguistics Jonathan Pool - Bernard Grofman: Linguistic artificiality and cognitive competence Claude Piron: Who are the speekers of Esperanto Tazio Carlevaro: Planned auxiliary language and communicative competence. Part V: The Language of Literature Manuel Halvelik: Planning nonstandard language Pierre Janton: If Shakespeare had written in Esperanto Part VI: Grammar Probal Dasgupta: Degree words in Esperanto and categories in Universal Grammar Klaus Schubert: An unplanned development in planned languages. Part VII: Terminology and Computational Lexicography Wera Blanke: Terminological standardization - its roots and fruits in planned languages Rudiger Eichholz: Terminics in the interethnic language Victor Sadler: Knowledge-driven terminography for machine translation Index -------------------------------------------------------------------- I'm not a linguist, and won't attempt to review the book from a linguistics point of view, but I will highlight some points of particular interest to Loglanists: First, there is some mention of Loglan (and the thousand-odd other artificial language projects to date), but the bulk of the focus is on Esperanto, for the simple reason that 99.9% of fluent planned-language users speak Esperanto, and a similar percentage of the written-text corpus from the planned language community is in Esperanto. (Any Loglanists who cannot tolerate mention of That Language are invited to stop reading at this point. :-) Second, I (and perhaps most Loglanists) was unaware of the Distributed Language Translation project, which seems to be of considerable potential interest to Loglanists. Quoting copyrighted material without permission: "Distributedd Language Translation is the name of a long-term research and development project carried out by the BSO software house in Utrecht with funding from the Netherlands Ministry of Economic Affairs. For the present seven year period (1985-1991) it has a budget of 17 million guilders... Although much larger in size than earlier attempts, DLT started off as just another project of the second stage, using Esperanto as its intermediate language. Esperanto had been judged suitable for this purpose because of its highly regular syntax and morphology and because its agglutinative nature promised an especially efficient possibility of morpheme-based coding of messages for network transmission. During the course of the first years of the large-scale practical development, however, the role of Esperanto in the DLT system increased substantially. the intermediate language took over more and more processes originally designed to be carried out either in the source or in the target languages of the multilingual system. When I consider the DLT system to be one step more highly developed than the earlier implementations involving Esperanto, it is because the increase in the role of Esperanto was due to intrinsic qualities of Esperanto as a planned language. In other words, Esperanto is in DLT no longer treated as any other language (which incidentally has a somewhat more computer-friendly grammar than other languages), but it is now used in DLT for a large part of the overall translation process _because of its special features as a planned language_. Some facets of this complex application are discussed by Sadler (in this volume.) "The functions fulfilled in DLT by means of Esperanto are numerous. Generally speaking one can say that since the insight about the usefulness of a planned language's particular features for natural-language processing, the whole DLT system design has tended to move into the Esperanto part of the system all functions that are not specific for particular source or target languages. These are all semantic and pragmatic processes of meaning disambiguation, word choice, detection of semantic deixis and reference relations, etc. So-called knowledge of the world has been stored in a lexical knowledge bank and is consulted by a word expert system. All these applications of Artificial Intelligence are in DLT carried out entirely in Esperanto. Let it be said explicitly: Esperanto does not serve as a programming language (DLT is implemented in Prolog and C), but as a human language which renders the full content of the source text being translated with all its nuances, disambiguates it and conveys it to the second translation step to a target language." Obviously, the existence of significant amounts of fully disambiguated, machine-processable Esperanto text in such a translation system opens up the possibility of wholesale mechanical translation into Loglan. This would be, obviously, particularly easy if the (currently poorly-defined) semantics of the Loglan affix system were brought into line with the existing semantics of the Esperanto affix system. In this case, bidirectional mechanical translation between the two languages might become quite easy, possible producing sort of an "instant literature" for the Loglanist. Building a simple correspondence between Esperanto and Loglan affixes is not as far-fetched an idea as it might first seem. Esperanto, like Loglan, uses a single root-stock of affixes which may be arbitrarily concatenated to form compound words. Where Loglan assigns *two* forms to (most) concepts, a pred and an affix, Esperanto uniformly assigns only a single affix (cutting the learning load in half!), but this poses no particular intertranslation problem. Loglan affixes are designed to be uniquely resolvable, and Esperanto affixes are not, but this problem has evidently already been solved, hence again poses no particular problem to bidirectional translation. Again, Loglan has a (putatively) unambiguous grammar which Esperanto lacks, but this problem has apparently already been satisfactorily resolved at the Esperanto end. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Elsewhere on the affix front, Loglan has a set of affixes, but has barely begun the enormous task of building the compound-word vocabulary. Loglan could learn from Esperanto on (at least) two levels. Most obviously, bringing the Loglan affix system into semantic correspondence with the Esperanto affix system would open the door to wholesale borrowing of Esperanto compound metaphors, capitalising on the planned language community's multimegamanyear investment. Unless there are sound engineering concerns to the contrary (I see none), there seems no reason to idly re-invent a wheel of this magnitude. This ain't a DOD project, folks :-) There will be language bigots on both sides opposed in principle to any cooperation, of course... Less obviously, Loglan may be able to benefit from the design knowledge gained from a century's experience with, and linguistic study of, the Esperanto affix system. Klaus Schubert's paper "An unplanned development in planned languages: A study of word grammar" is suggestive. Zamenhof, like Jim Brown, paid no particular attention to word formation in his original design, simply providing a uniform stock of primitives which could be concatenated at will to create new words. Despite this lack of conscious planning, linguistic study of word formation in Esperanto (started by Rene de Saussure -- not to be confused with Ferdinand Saussure -- and continued by Sergej Kuznecov and others), this simple *syntactic* combination rule has supported the development of a systematic set of *semantic* combination rules. These (unwritten and unconscious but nevertheless universal) semantic combination rules allow the Esperantist, when faced with an unfamiliar compound word, to not only decompose it into (usually) familiar primitives, but also to somewhat systematically deduce the meaning of the word. Recent decades have apparently seen increasingly free use of these facilities. I won't attempt a summary of these semantic rules here, but will try to give the flavor. Even though the primitive stock *syntactically* forms a single neutral pool, it appears that prims are *semantically* treated in word combination by Experantists as being divided into noun, verb and modifier (combined adverb/adjective) classes, which combine with distinctively different rules. This distinction provides one dimension for sorting prims. A second, orthogonal dimension sorts prims into the categories independent morpheme, declension morpheme, ending (these first three correspond roughly to Loglan's "little words"), affixoid, affix and root (these final three correspond to the Loglan affix set). These affix types combine according to a word-compounding grammar which allows the listener to distinguish (among other things) those compounds whose meaning is directly deducable from the meaning of the component prims, from those compounds whose meaning is metaphorical and must be learned. If Loglan were to borrow the Esperanto compound vocabulary wholesale, it would of course, willy nilly, inherit these semantic regularities as well. Otherwise, it might be well to study these regularities and consciously incorporate them in the Loglan vocabulary. -- Jeff jsp@milton.u.washington.edu