Re: Bigbabytalk -a primitive language for AI

----- Original Message -----
From: "Danny Wier" <dawier@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Saturday, September 09, 2000 9:43 PM
Subject: Re: Bigbabytalk -a primitive language for AI


> --- Jonathan Chang <Zhang2323@...> wrote:
> > In a message dated 2000:09:09 7:24:13 PM, dawier@YAHOO.COM writes:
> >
> > >It was cute.  And I was able to decipher it.  But tell me, is that
> > >really based on Chinese grammar and English vocabulary?
> >
> >     Not really. Chinese is a lil more complicated than that (what
> > with all
> > the grammatical particles & such, which I find myself in a love-hate
> > relationship with in terms of my ConLang Caos Pidgin... I admire the
> > more
> > elliptical Classical Chinese used in poetry that avoids particles
> > like they
> > were cockroaches, used only when absolutely necessary...)
>
> Aw, I should've said "based on a very prejudiced interpretation of
> Chinese grammar which claims that Chinese has no grammar..."
I have heard Russians say that "English has no
grammar."

> I found the same thing with Modern Persian (Farsi et al), where the old
> Indo-Iranian eight-case system eventually broke down into a single case
> system with prepositions, _idhafat_ linking of nouns and adjectives (or
> genitives), suffixes for posession, etc.
>
> And we all know English itself is a very old (since Middle English)
> Franco-Germanic pidgin after all.
I don't think the specialists consider that English
was ever a pidgin.

> > >  (Actually I'm
> > >prejudiced against any English-based IAL's or "global pidgins".
Most people don't like pidgins based on their
own languages. They seem crude and even
laughable.

> >     I feel the same way - in a fashion,... that's why I am making
> > Caos Pidgin
> > based on Italo-Spanish-like lexifying.
But now the Romance speakers may find it
offensive/laughable.

> >     Italian and Spanish at least have better phonemic spellings than
> > English
> > & is IMHO more appealling aesthetically to my sensibilities.
>
> I agree.  And this sounds a lot like my Big Six project, which I may
> end up abandoning since, well, I'm just not interested anymore; I've
> grown very cynical about IAL's.
A common phenomenon.

> I still prefer the idea of a "global
> pidgin", and I know there are already better projects much further in
> development than my Big Six.
>
> Leo Moser, a member of AUXLANG (at least when I was there), has a
> database of words from the major languages.  I forgot what it's called,
> "World Vocabulary" or something?  Or am I thinking of Bislama?
> <clip>                         DaW.
Bahasan was a vocabulary project aimed at looking for
words that were widely distributed, especially among the
"non-European" languages and areas. Its results are being
used in the Acadon project. I've posted samples of (draft)
Acadon to Conlang in the past.

Acadon does not focus on "the major languages" or any
subset thereof. It tries to look at the entire global situation,
so any language can count. Of course there is a vast
problem in this, since all the needed data is not available.
But we do the best we can.

Best regards,                        Leo

Leo J. Moser