[lojban] Re: Military language

[Seth Gordon <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

M@ wrote:
> 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.

One acronym used by the US military is "BEN", "Basic Encyclopedia
Number".  The Defense Intelligence Agency distributes a "Basic
Encyclopedia" with code numbers and coordinates for, well, anything that
our military might some day have an interest in bombing.

The encyclopedia is classified (duh), so I have no idea whether or not
any pretty little girl's schools are in it.

> 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.

Isn't there a standard to always use "NOT REPEAT NOT" in military
telegrams to make sure the reader doesn't skip over the word?


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