ecn-pa.scott (07/15/82)
Are there any speakers/hackers of esperanto out there? I seem to remember a note by (I think) J.C.Winterton (sorry if it's not really him...) in esperanto asking if anybody was interested in esperanto, but that's the last I saw. Cu vi parolas esperanton? ~p (argh) Scott Deerwester
msj@warwick.UUCP (Mike Joy) (02/05/86)
Is anyone out there interested in using Esperanto as a vehicle for machine communication (e.g. as a natural language 'front-end' or as part of a programming language)?
neal@druhi.UUCP (Neal D. McBurnett) (02/10/86)
The European Economic Community is sponsoring the Dutch company BSO (in Utrecht) to study semi-automatic translation between European languages using an Intermediate Language (IL) based on Esperanto, First, a non-linguist would enter the original text, while the system (a set of 5 68000's) translated it into the IL, and asked questions (in the source language) to resolve ambiguities. The end user would then use a workstation equipped with a single 68000 to call up the database of IL text and translate (fully automatically) selected material into the desired target language. They are writing the system in PROLOG, using a Vax running UNIX as the development system (mcvax!bsovax). A feasibility study was published in October of '83 by A. Witkam entitled "DLT: Distributed Language Translation -- a Multilingual facility for videotex information networks." You can get it from the Esperanto League for North America, Box 1129, El Cerrito CA 94530, 415-653-0998. It is mostly linguistic in nature (but very readable), but also describes the hardware and software in some detail. There is a good bibliography. BSO, Box 8348, NL-3503 RH Utrecht, Netherlands, (31) 30 911 911. Why is Esperanto a suitable basis for the IL? I can quickly think of three reasons: 1) The lexicon is already well-developed. Any intermediate representation of language requires the selection of an appropriate lexicon. This is an enormous task, which should be based on a comparison of many languages. For nearly 100 years esperantists have addressed exactly this problem, and have produced a very practical, concise, and flexible lexicon, along with precise definitions and a good understanding of the mechanics of word formation. 2) An IL should be relatively unambiguous, but not so abstract that translating into it is unnecessarily complicated. There are forms of syntactic ambiguity which are common to most languages, and should simply be passed on from the source language to the target language. (When human readers take the semantic content of the text into account, the ambiguities are resolved, but this is a very difficult task for the computer.) Esperanto strikes a good balance between these conflicting goals and makes it easy to "pass through" some difficult kinds of syntactic ambiguity. 3) An Esperanto-based IL is very easy for a human to read. This makes testing and debugging much easier than it would be in a system in which the IL was a more abstract computer representation. I've also heard of someone in Germany who borrowed parts of the syntax and lexicon of Esperanto for a computer language. I've seen lots of examples of people simply replacing the keywords of their favorite language with Esperanto words. Finally, in my own programs, I've played with using Esperanto for identifier names. The flexibility and orthogonality of the affixes makes it easier to distinguish between similar variables, e.g. a given object, a pointer to that object, an array of such objects, etc. Neal McBurnett, ihnp4!druny!neal, 303-538-4852
cipher@mmm.UUCP (Andre Guirard) (06/02/86)
Cu [someone out there] sur "net" parleras Esperanton? Mi [just started to learn] Esperanton kaj [want someone] por (de?) [write to for practice]. [I've just GOT to find an Esperanto dictionary somehow!] Gracias (?), -- /'C`\ TWALG ASHALC RITMOHF. Andre Guirard ( o_o ) Filo de hundino )) _ (( AWSWG SWVVG BWSWBSWH! ihnp4!mmm!cipher /// \\\