pete@basser.oz (Peter Merel) (10/18/89)
I saw an article on this language in the October 17 Australian. Apparently it is the invention of a K. S. Gopalakrishna, a self-educated indian farmer. Abasama, according to the article, is not so much a language of itself as a universal key to language. "... words are allocated a numerical value. For example, pronouns like he, she or I are given the number 1000. The zeros are then changed according to the word's gender, number and case ... the numbers allotted to a meaning are fixed and those same numbers are given to the word of the same meaning in any other language ... These number sequences can be translated into any language that has developed a dictionary corresponding to the numbers allocated to meanings in the Abasama language ... Dicitionaries for Abasama have already been compiled in English, Hindi and Sanskrit ..." This sounds pretty good, both for automatic translation purposes and for last ditch efforts to communicate with anyone that does not share a language with you. My main qualm is that I am not certain that all languages' semantics are commensurable. Drawing a possibly inappropriate counterexample, I don't believe that an Abasama approach could be used to translate C code into Prolog, because the grammatical and methodological (cultural?) paradigms are too different. Does anybody know of an automated version of this somewhere? At the very least I'd like to try Phillip K. Dick's reverse translation game on it. It could be very difficult, and very instructive, to maintain shades of meaning in Abasama translations between English and Japanese and back again, for instance. -- "A dog don't want a bone / That's why he buries it" - James Brown pete@basser.oz.AU