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Date: Mon, 30 Nov 1998 10:01:25 -0500
From: John Cowan <cowan@locke.ccil.org>
Organization: Lojban Peripheral
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From: John Cowan <cowan@locke.ccil.org>

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Forwarded for Hartmut Pilch, who's having trouble sending
to Lojban List.

-- 
John Cowan	http://www.ccil.org/~cowan		cowan@ccil.org
	You tollerday donsk?  N.  You tolkatiff scowegian?  Nn.
	You spigotty anglease?  Nnn.  You phonio saxo?  Nnnn.
		Clear all so!  'Tis a Jute.... (Finnegans Wake 16.5)
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From: PILCH Hartmut <phm@oas.a2e.de>
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To: John Cowan <cowan@locke.ccil.org>
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Subject: UNL, Lojban and MLHT
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On Tue, 24 Nov 1998, John Cowan wrote:

> Sounds pretty crude and primitive compared to Lojban.

Why not outperform the UNL vaporware then?
Could a Lojban parser output intelligible English some day? 
That would get Lojban really off the ground.
Even learning would be made much much easier.

Btw, I am working on an Emacs Lisp MultiLingual HyperText system

	http://www.lrz.de/~phm/mlht/

which takes a lot of redundancy out of multilingual documentation,
and the ultimate aim is of course to have a kind of UNL.
But so far not much of the saving is at the grammatical level.

I could imagine the following workflow:

1 write a universal language (Lojban) text,
2 run the [prolog] parser, output a lisp representation,
3 run the Lisp2English (or other lang) output formatter

Developping interactive editors that help unsophisticated people write in
the universal language is a very difficult secondary step.  The UNL people
are [pretending to be] doing second things first.   For the time being it
would be enough if sophisticated people can be enabled to 

"write once --- be understood everywhere".

Is Lojban suitable for trying to achieve this?
Could any conlang be more suitable than Lojban?

-- 
Hartmut Pilch
http://www.a2e.de/phm/


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