Re: Universal Translation Language

> >> Thanks for your advice, though it's not the aim of my language to be a
> >> philosophical one or so. The important thing is to keep it unambiguous
> >> enough to be suitable for computer parsing and MT. Btw, this can bring
> >> subsequent linguistic advantages, but as I said on my first message,
> >
> >Here's the thing.  Wittgenstein's corpus is very much concerned with the
> >question of ambiguity, and ultimately with whether or not it is a
> >universal good to eliminate ambiguity.
>=20
> Indeed - in fact such a language would make some things quite
> untranslatable since the effect the writer is trying to produce depends
> upon a certain degree of ambiguity.  And this varies considerable from
> language to language and is one of those things that cause headaches to
> translators.
>=20
> Indeed, I have grave doubts whether it is possible to eliminate all
> ambiguity.  Classical Yiklamu has possibly the largest vocabulary of all
> conlangs and was design specifically to be as unambiguous as possible as
> regards lexicon.  But I suspect one skilled in its use could still be
> umbiguous if s/he wished to be.
I have grave doubts as to whether it's *desirable* to eliminate ambiguity.
But it is certainly worthwhile to be ambiguous in an unambiguous way :-)
For instance, the word "set" is a very ambiguous word in the wrong way; you
need to rely on context to figure out which of its many meanings is intende=
d.
However, there is no need to be absolutely specific about your information;
if you want to say "the beauty of the sky" there's no real need to try to
become more specific about this meaning ("of" is also ambiguous in the wron=
g
way because it has several distinct types of meanings, but let's say we've
chosen and indicated one of these) -- "the feeling I have, which makes me
think of beauty, when I look at the sky that I am observing right now".
None of that.  In Aroven you are free to create a link of arbitrary precisi=
on
or vagueness -- the equivalent of "the beauty of the sky" indicates a simpl=
e
connection between the concept of beauty (ce'ge"l) and the concept of the s=
ky
(ce'finnad).  The purpose of the language is to clearly represent the thoug=
hts
of the speaker, not to force the speaker to "disambiguate" his/her thoughts
in order to speak them.  Syntactic ambiguity is all the language demands,
ambiguity of the original thought is freely allowed if the speaker wishes i=
t.
It is not impossible for a single language to satisfy both the needs of hum=
an
"fuzzy" thought structures and loglang-anambiguity.  The apparent discrepan=
cy
results from the influence of the real enemy to logical languages: ambiguit=
y
in (syntax or) the conceptions of words: "ambiguity" has here been interpre=
ted
as meaning two rather different things.

Josh

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