Re: OT: Utterly shameless self-promotion

* hchester said on 2006-05-21 15:37:47 +0200
> I am new to this list, so I have not been following previous posts and may
> misinterpret some until I become more familiar with everyone.
Start by not top-posting :)

> I am interested in machine translation of languages and am particularly
> interested in your computer translation of compounds.
My thesis was just a variation upon the old saw where a compound is
translated piece by piece, then using a web search to select the most
likely translation. It could probably be used for any *transparent*
compound, that is: where you can guess the meaning from the meaning of
the pieces. There are plenty of non-transparent compounds that'll have
to be treated like regular words.

> Would this apply to constructed languages such as earth language where
> visual symbols are combined?  Examples of combinations can be found on
> the Earth Language website  www.earthlanguage.org
If each symbol carried its most frequent meaning in the compound, and
the compound was transparent, then yes. However, it is often the case in
conlanging that compounds are used to encode a meaning that in natlangs
take a single, separate word. I haven't looked at Earthlanguage, but for
instance with tokipona and other languages based on a handful of
semantic primes, automatic translation is very hard. This is because
most words in such languages are compounds, as opposed to, say,
Norwegian, where only 10% of words in a text are (potentially brand new)
compounds.

> * "taliesin the storyteller" <taliesin-conlang@...>
/snip shameless self-promotion/


t.

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