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From: nik@scs.leeds.ac.uk (Nik Silver)
Subject: Re: The Potential Pitfalls of Interlinguas
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Date: Sun, 16 Oct 1994 19:54:36 +0100 (BST)
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Rene Andersen (flanhart@diku.dk) wrote:
> [...] In the original posting i summed it up as follows:

>   The crux of the matter is, that the more languages you include in your
>   interlingua, the finer the distinction of categories should be. No
>   natural or god-given categorization seems to appear at any stage. All
>   you get is a finer and finer distinction. For this reason, there is no
>   atoms on which to build an interlingua, meaning it is
>   practically impossible to construct an interlingua!!!

> So my point is that the categories you would have to have in your
> interlingua, would not correspond to categories in any real world
> language nor to the way we think in categories (as you mention
> yourself later).  The categories in the interlingua would be
> completely artificial!! I think we agree on this point. 

Someone else who agrees with this point is John M. Ellis. The essential
argument (that we all agree on) is that saying "`leg' means legs" is
circular. The only way we can make this can make sense is if we have some
common agreement beforehand. That is, information (the concept of legs)
does not exist without language (the word "leg").

> [...]  But -- and this is a huge BUT -- take a step
> backwards, and have a look at the artillery required to deal with such
> a simple problem as the one posed. What if I had used given words like
> "love" or "democracy". Words that have a much more complex
> structure. In these cases I find it completely impossible not just for
> one person to define these words intewrlingual, but also for a group
> of people to AGREE on these definitions.  I could even be mean and ask
> you to define "right" or "wrong" interlingual.

This is *exactly* the point that Ellis makes. (He uses the words
"good" and "bad" as an example.) If we're talking about coding language,
then we should start with words like "right" and "love" because
(a) we need to include them eventually, and so we should start to fit
the most difficult data first, and (b) they were probably around long
before more easily definable words like "triangle" and maybe "leg".
Note similarities to Wittgenstein's problem of defining "game".


> For these reason I say it is practically impossible to construct an
> interlingua -- even though some may consider it theoretically
> possible.  As a further argument for this position, consider the fact
> that no-one has yet succeded in doing so.

Information may not exist without language, but we may still conceive
of an interlingua. That interlingua can be a natural language itself.
Klaus Schubert has worked on a machine translation system using
Esperanto as the interlingua. Having a natural language as an interlingua
(and leaving aside the question of whether or not Esperanto is natural)
means that (for example) words of too rough a granularity can be specified
with relative clauses. Any theoretical problems will be exactly those
of a human translator, which is not a bad result.

Nik.

@book{Ellis93,
	author	= "John M. Ellis",
	title	= "Language, Thought and Logic",
	year	= "1993",
	publisher	= "Northwestern University Press",
	address	= "Evanston, IL"}

@article{Schubert86,
	author	= "Klaus Schubert",
	title	= "Lnguistic and Extra-Linguistic Knowledge",
	journal	= "Computers and Translation",
	volume	= "1",
	year	= "1986",
	pages	= "125--152",
	publisher	= "Paradigm Press Inc."}

@inproceedings{Schubert88,
	author	= "Klaus Schubert",
	booktitle	= "Proceedings of the 12th International Conference
		on Computional Linguistics, COLING '88",
	pages	= "599--601",
	year	= "1988"}

@book{Wittgenstein53,
	author	= "Ludwig Wittgenstein",
	title	= "Philosophical Investigations",
	year	= "1953",
	publisher	= "Blackwell",
	address	= "Oxford"}
