14 November 2018 - language resources

Do human languages seem varied to you, because they differ in grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, word structure, and world structure? Two cultures that meet can always create an easily-learned pidgin and talk to each other. The trouble comes from tacit assumptions; history says that the two always misunderstand each other at first. In the wider universe of communication codes, two spoken languages are as alike as preface and pretext. Try to instruct a computer and you’ll see what I mean—computers were designed for human purposes, and yet the code you struggle to write correctly is comprehensively transformed when it is translated to the machine’s native bits, because those are so much harder to write. Do you imagine that we can guess what space aliens might be like?