Re: more thoughts on lujvo

[cbmvax!uunet!pucc.princeton.edu!jimc]

Chris Handley <CHandley@GANDALF.OTAGO.AC.NZ> writes:
> Dave Cortesi raises some interesting ideas on th relationship
> between the speaker and the listener. This is especially true if
> these are of different cultures and may therefore apply different
> "world knowledge" to the interpretation.
>
> What happens if the auditor is a computer? Even reasonably smart
> computer programs are (typically) woefully lacking in any sort of
> world-knowledge and have very little culture to fall back on...

Some Loglanists and also Language X people have been reluctant to
put computer processing high on their list of goals.  I also doubt
that either language will actually be used a lot in practice for
computer processing.  But the discipline of making the language
comprehensible to a computer, I think, is very valuable.  It
implies, for example, that ambiguity is extremely expensive and
should be avoided wherever feasible.  Computer orientation also
puts a premium on simplicity.  Both of these dimensions have a big
impact on how easy it is for the humans to learn and use the
language, and to use it as a model in language research.  Thus
even though I don't expect to use it much on computers, I feel
that accomodating computer analysis is important.

                -- jimc