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Forum Member with most language families | ||
Tags: Polyglot | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5807 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 33 of 41 11 October 2010 at 10:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
Maybe, but that's beside the point. To use Esperanto as an interlingua, you're going to have to coin neologisms for items without any translation, which is no different from coining compounds such as rain-place in English. The affix system may be helpful, but a machine interlingua doesn't need affixes -- a machine interlingua will (if I remember the classes correctly, but this was some time ago now) represent inflections as a series of "attributes" to the root. An efficient machine interlingua is actually very hard to show clearly as text. Esperanto's affixes may be useful, but Esperanto doesn't have affixes to distinguish all the known number systems in human use. The ones I've heard of are: Invariant Singular / plural. Singular / dual / plural. Singular-dual / plural. Singular / paucal / plural. (And the boundary between paucal and plural varies between languages, too.) The benefits of Esperanto are minimal against its weaknesses. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5807 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 34 of 41 11 October 2010 at 10:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Although there's one thing the UNIKOM team certainly have got right:
" UNIKOM deals with ambiguous words in the source language by rejecting them, and requiring the substitution of unambiguous ones. " [www.unikom.org] A good human translator will always ask for clarification, so a good computer translator should too. But that limits the target market to producers of translations, not consumers of untranslated documents. It's a difficult product to sell, because the producers have a massive financial incentive to get things right first time, so there's still a massive burden in verifying the accuracy of the translation, which still requires competent bilingual... translators. I do find this claim a bit strong.... " UNIKOM, LLC. (Universala Komunikado) has developed systems that can provide instantaneous, accurate, and grammatically correct communication networking among natural languages. " The text that follows seems to suggest that the system as yet cannot provide any translation.... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6235 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 35 of 41 11 October 2010 at 10:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
Classic "the perfect is the enemy of the good." The point is that there are usable dictionaries that go quite far. They're not perfect. The point is that a better system also involves starting from scratch. With unlimited time and funding, that's worth doing. Without that, it's not so clear-cut. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 6811 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 36 of 41 12 October 2010 at 12:02am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm glad that the Esperanto discussion has moved on. There are separate threads where you can discuss (argue?) this issue at length. On a similar vein, machine translation, however interesting, is off topic. As such, I suggest that any interested parties start a new thread and leave this one to discover who amongst us can claim the coveted prize of "Most Language Families".
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| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6346 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 37 of 41 12 October 2010 at 1:45am | IP Logged | |||||
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Indo-European: English, Spanish, French
Niger-Congo: Swahili, Sambaa Tai-Kadai: Thai Japonic: Japanese Sino-Tibetan: Mandarin Wow, I just realized Russian is also Indo-European. It'll be a while before I venture into my 6th family. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5807 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 38 of 41 12 October 2010 at 10:40am | IP Logged | |||||
Iversen offered to split this thread, so I continued posting on the assumption that he'd do so shortly. Starting a new thread would mean losing the older posts, so I didn't want to start one with a split on the horizon. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6346 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 39 of 41 15 October 2010 at 1:49am | IP Logged | |||||
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I like this thread, because I'm tied for the lead. Can anyone top 5 families?
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| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5938 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 40 of 41 15 October 2010 at 2:34am | IP Logged | |||||
I can't top you, but I can tie with you. ;) Here are the families of languages that I speak or study (basically the ones I have listed in my profile). 1. Indo-European: English, Dutch, German, Swedish; Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian; Greek; Russian; Persian 2. Japonic: Japanese 3. Niger-Congo: Swahili 4. Uralic: Finnish 5. Constructed: Esperanto Esperanto is a bit of a stretch to include there; I used to have basic fluency but ignored the language for several months and forgot a lot, and I don't have any plans of reviving my skills anytime soon. Within the next year I'm planning on adding Arabic and Georgian into the mix too, so that would add the Afro-Asiatic and Kartvelian families, bringing my total up to either six or seven, depending on whether or not we count Esperanto. Edited by ellasevia on 15 October 2010 at 2:35am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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