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Subject: Minmal amount of regular and orthogonal concepts.
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 2010 12:13:03 +0000 (UTC)
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My previous post re. <a proposed method for any/all written-language
users to be able to communicate with foreigners> entitled:
  "Experiment in communicating with Chinese/Japanese writers?"
was probably confusing, because it was a 1st-draft/brain-storm.

Related thereto: I've analysed what makes a 'good' computer language;
i.e. which is easy to master yet powereful.

It should have a mimimum number of concepts,
and be regular; ie. the rules should have no exceptions,
and each concepts should be distinct and not almost like some other
  concept - with which it can be easily confused.
Importantly, it should 'facilitate hello world'; that means it should be easy
to make a fully functional minimal demonstration, which can be extended.
In computing, this minimal demonstration, is the computer printing
"Hello world".

My proposed system could, with minimal effort allow the user to 
communicate with all foreigners e.g.
 "you sell:not potatoe,
 you buy rice".
 
 Recently I was thinking how stupid Radio-China was, in telling that
 "in Chinese 'take care' is 'FhooWha'  ".  This information is as useless 
 as  telling me how to say "tooth paste" in Chinese. 
 "Tooth paste" an isolated concept  which can't easlily 'network' to 
 extend to greater knowledge like:
    "you sell:not potatoe;  you buy rice", can to:
    "you buy:not rice", "you sell potatoe ....etc."
    
 By the networking principle [arithmetic], just adding one more
 <primitive-element:sentence> like "man see boy", extends your
 'vocabulary' with:
   "man buy:not potatoe", "boy see rice", ....etc.
   
Besides 'take care' is idiomatic [and idiotic] which is exactly
what my system aims to avoid. The communication must be strictly
literal to be culturally neutral - as far as possible.
 
I image that 4 collaborators, in eg. english, arabic, russian, chinese;
could start communicating, and evolve the/a 'set of primitives'.
And soon get to the stage that they could communicate quiet complex
ideas between each other.

What do you think ?

== Chris Glur.