John Cowan wrote: > You persist in misunderstanding. Suppose I came along and told you > I wanted to create a Unicode codepoint for each word in every language > on Earth. Would you blithely allocate me a 24-billion-codepoint > private space?
Why? 200 millions should be more than enough: that's more than 30.000 words for each living language. Of course, you should only encode abstract words, such as <ENGLISH VERB JOKE>, and combining morphemes such as <ENGLISH COMBINING INFLECTION PAST TENSE>, <ENGLISH COMBINING INFLECTION PRESENT PARTICIPLE>, etc. It will be the task of the uttering engine to utter a sequence like <ENGLISH VERB JOKE> + <ENGLISH COMBINING INFLECTION PRESENT PARTICIPLE> with the ligature "joking". Of course, this will only happen with OpenLex-enabled uttering engines: naive uttering engine based on old TrueLex would render with the fallback uttering "joke -ing". To make it more interesting, you could also encode a few useless compatibility presentation inflected forms such <ENGLISH VERB SPEAK PAST TENSE FORM>, which will get decomposed to <ENGLISH VERB SPEAK> + <ENGLISH COMBINING INFLECTION PAST TENSE>, and finally be rendered as "spoke", "speaked" or "speak -ed", depending on the platform. Notice that a few words will need contextual forms, such as <ENGLISH INDETERMINATE ARTICLE>, which will display as "a" or "an" depending on the following code point. Languages, such as Swahili, which use prefixes instead than suffixes will be encoded in "logical order", i.e. with the combining prefix after the root. It will be the task of the uttering engine to reorder the prefix. E.g., the Swahili word "watu" (plural of "mtu" = "man") will be encoded as <SWAHILI NOUN TU> + <SWAHILI COMBINING INFLECTION PLURAL FOR PEOPLE> and, in theory, it will be rendered as "watu". In practice, it will always be rendered as "-tu wa-" because no one will invest in implementing Swahili rendering. Ciao. Marco
