[109267] in Cypherpunks
Re: clique surveillance: what can you learn?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jim Gillogly)
Mon Mar 15 21:32:26 1999
Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 10:18:39 -0800
From: Jim Gillogly <jim@acm.org>
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Reply-To: Jim Gillogly <jim@acm.org>
Osama Bin Laden <waste@zor.hut.fi> or somebody wrote:
> BTW, has anyone thought about creating an optimal language for
> human communication purposes?
Yes, lots of people. The first on record is the Lingua Ignota
of St. Hildegarde of Bingen (12th century). Others since, including
Bishop Wilkins and John Dalgarno, produced a priori languages, using
a Dewey Decimal-like assignment of concepts to lexemes. Esperanto is
the most popular artificial language, but has declined from its peak
in about the 1920s. James Cooke Brown's language Loglan was designed
in the 50's to recast language as predicate calculus, in hopes that
when speakers became fluent in it they would automatically begin
thinking more logically -- a proactive Whorf-Sapir initiative.
Heinlein was familiar with at least the Sci Am article on Loglan, and
used it vigorously in his short story "Gulf" and mentioned it by name
(but without the Whorf aspects) in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress."
Other science fiction writers such as Jack Vance ("The Languages of
Pao") and Frank Herbert ("Dune") have used as plot elements languages
designed for optimal communications.
The most recent effort I know of is a Japanese initiative to produce
a common language that would be legible to people and computers, so
that only 2*n rather than n^2 translators would need to be written.
I don't recall the name of the project, but when I checked them last
they hadn't actually published any vocabulary. Might be OK for
transmitting rough ideas, but I think subtle prose would suffer such
automatic translation badly.
--
Jim Gillogly
Highday, 23 Rethe S.R. 1999, 17:44
12.19.6.0.8, 3 Lamat 1 Cumku, Eighth Lord of Night
