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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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