[PLUG] Since constructed languages came up recently...

[Lynn Bradshaw via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

I may be going out on a limb a bit for the purposes of this mailing
list but I thought it was worth mentioning since it was recently
announced that LibreOffice will now support the constructed languages
Klingon, of Star Trek fame, and Interslavic, which is a constructed
Slavic language meant to facilitate communication among various Slavs
with the presumed goal of violent fights not breaking out.

Somebody mentioned training their dog(s) in Klingon, which is really
something else and made me smile. I've seen police K-9 footage with
German phrases like "Fass! Fass! Fass!" ("Grab the suspect!") and
"Los! Los! Los!" ("Let them go!") which, as I understand, is done to
preempt the dogs from getting commanded by random strangers. (Security
by obscurity.) That's clever, but dogs trained with Klingon can
probably only be reached by maybe a few thousands (?) of people.

Anyway, I just wanted to mention the constructed language Lojban:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban

I don't know a ton about it but the effort is interesting, and noble:
"Lojban is proposed as a speakable language for communication between
people of different language backgrounds, as a potential means of
machine translation, and as a tool to explore the intersection between
human language and software.[2]"

It's a constructed language predicated explicitly on formal logic. The
vocabulary comes from a whole host of human languages, but all cast in
the logical mold just mentioned. Think Python, except you can actually
in principle speak it to others in a meaningful way. I think it might
be very useful for efforts involving natural language processing and
development of better, more easily useful programming languages.

There are even preliminary efforts to do the same:

https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Lojban_as_a_programming_language

Hope this wasn't too weird and "out there".

Best,
Lynn Bradshaw
___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group         --        http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  --   http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug