On 9/6/05, Naomi K <alien.juxtaposition@gmail.com> wrote:
"Loglans are poor MT interlinguas" -
http://www.rickharrison.com/language/mtil.html
Most of you would probably know of this article, which argues that the syntax of Lojban is overly complex;
I agree. Fortunately, most of the bells and whistles that
make it overly complex are hardly ever, or never, used.
Lojban as it is actually used is quite more simple
than its definition. Some day we might have a simpler
syntax without losing continuity.
sumti place structures are too rigid and counter-intuitive;
They are generally bloated, but since most superfluous
places are in the last places this is not a terrible problem
as they tend not to be used. Again, eventually some day
we will have better place structures without losing significant
continuity.
that an artificial language would be more difficult to translate into natural languages as opposed to natural language to natural language translation;
I'm not sure I see why.
that required pauses are unnatural and impractical;
It is unfortunate that Lojban teaching material talks so
much about "pauses" instead of "glottal stops", which
are normal phonemes in many natural languages.
and that the compound words are difficult for ML to translate.
What is your view of this argument?
I don't really believe Lojban is especially helpful for
machine translation, but I don't think it's especially
unhelpful either.
mu'o mi'e xorxes