--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Bhairitu <noozg...@...> wrote: > > Supposedly some translations engines use Sanskrit as an > intermediate language because it is unambiguous. The program > will take text in a language and translate it to Sanskrit and > then from Sanskrit to the target language.
I´m sorry, but this sounds like bullshit to me. I know very little about Sanskrit, but everything I ever heard talked specifically *about* its ambiguity. They talked about poetry forms in which every word in the verse could have several meanings, and the whole *art* of the poetry form was being able to put a whole series of these words -- *each* of them having four or five meanings -- together in such a way that no matter which meaning of any of the words you pick, the whole verse still makes sense. Plus, just looking at the definitions Card posts here, words often have *more* than four or five completely different meanings, right there in the definitions he posts. So I´m thinkin´ that this stuff about using Sanskrit as an ¨intermediate language¨ for trans- lation engines is just someone´s True Believer bullshit. If you want an unambiguous language, choose French. That is why all international treaties use it as the ¨master language¨ for the treaties. There is a copy in the language of each country, but the master is in French, because it is so precise. Everything I´ve ever heard about Sanskrit presents it as just the opposite. Card or others can correct me on this if I´ve heard incorrectly. I´m not trying to knock Sanskrit or anything; it´s just that Bhairitu´s claim sounds the opposite of everything I´ve ever heard about the nature of Sanskrit as a language.
