TurquoiseB wrote: > --- 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. Here: http://americansanskrit.com/read/a_techage.php
Guess maybe you forgot that article you must have read in AI Magazine back in 1985. :-D Those NASA folks must be real TB'ers. Unlike you, I have studied Sanskrit so I have seen the veracity in the concept. And Sanskrit is thought to be an engineered language. There are other languages like Korean which were also engineered. English is a mongrel language having many different roots and is ambiguous as hell plus so many words that use way outdated non-phonetic spellings. I suspect that in the next 50 years, due to the internet, a world language will evolve and English itself may become more phonetic in it's spellings.
