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Old 11-17-2007, 12:35 PM   #8 (permalink)
Lak
Insane
 
Location: New Zealand
Deciding which concepts to render and which ones to throw away is proving to be properly confusing. English distinguishes on a lot of concepts which are absent from other languages. Also there are a few elegant concepts which English bungled or implements implicitly which make it difficult for me to turn into nice symbols because my language makes it hard for me to grasp properly. What I need are people with a decent understanding of a variety of languages to provide representation for me.

I am natively english speaking, and while I wouldn't call myself bilingual I have some experience with Japanese and a passing knowledge of Chinese. I'm delving deeper into chinese because I think the grammar would be useful for this project, but studying Lojban and Interlingua is also proving quite insightful.

Your 'faire' example I think is valid, but even a little tame. What we're dealing with is an idiom - in french the concepts 'create' and 'do' are not the same thing, they just have the same word. English is fucking terrifying for this sort of thing. Not only with an enviable collection of homonyms like that, but also a vast array of, when you think about it, really stupid idioms. Consider 'go to sleep', 'go fishing' and 'make some time'. None of these literally mean what they should, but are nonetheless the most correct way to say them. These are the things that cloud my brain when I'm trying to build my simplified grammar.

As for interpretation, my first goal is human readability. Machine readability is a distant second on that list, but would certainly be very useful for example as a step in an automatic universal translator, using this new language as a pivot. Something to consider further along tho, definitely.
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