Ambiguities are different from
misunderstandings. The US
military dialect of English isn’t a particularly ambiguous one in this
day and age. Consider the (ir)regular english phrase, “I’d
like you to bomb the pretty little girl’s school” for
instance. The military translation of that wouldn’t involve the
words ‘I’d’, ‘like’, ‘you’, ’to’,
‘pretty’, ‘little’ or ‘girls’ and it would
involve a time, specific coordinates, and maybe a munitions type. It also
helps that the military has well defined acronyms/abbrevs for nearly everything.
Of course, there can still be
misunderstandings, if there is interference and the word ‘na’ doesn’t
come through out of “ko na daspo le ckule” bad things would
probably happen. And that does cost lives, but the military is doing
everything they can to establish protocols to prevent that kind of thing from
happening.
--M@
From:
lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org [mailto:lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org] On Behalf Of Fen Fen
Sent: Tuesday, January 02, 2007
7:01 PM
To: ri
Subject: [lojban] Military
language
Does language figure into warfare? Do common ambiguities in
English result directly in death, or loss? We have "military time",
and various military linguistic traditions "SIR, yes, SIR".
The SW hypothesis asks if language influences thought. Does it influence who
lives and who dies?
This is both of historic importance and also of coming relevance, especially
when combined with transhumanistic technologies.
ii ru'e