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Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2001 10:14:00 -0400
From: John Colagioia <JColagioia@csi.com>
Organization: No Conspiracy Here...
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Subject: Re: Is English the ultimate language for IF?
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Karl Filenius wrote:

> cons:
> I can't think of any.

Here are a handful, just off the top of my head.  Most are based on some
idealized form of IF parsing, and may or may not reflect the state of the art in
any situation.

- English, inheriting the vast majority of its vocabulary from different
sources, has little regular word formation, meaning that every word must be
coded into the program in order to be recognized.  Contrast with, for example,
French, where you can "deglutenize" a word to an unidentifiable root and
distinguish between "this word isn't implemented" and "I have no idea what
you're talking about."

- English, being extremely widespread, has an extraordinary number of dialects.
These range from trivial spelling differences (British/American) to oddities in
word order (I don't remember where, but I vaguely remember a pocket of Americans
that traditionally start sentences with the verb) to almost entirely different
vocabularies (near any Creole- or Pidgin-speaking area, typically).

- English, having no grammatical gender other than personal pronouns, the
pronoun base is significantly smaller (one, in most cases), meaning that things
have to be referenced explicitly more often, or risk absurd ambiguity.  In fact,
there was a debate, here, if I remember my research correctly, on whether or not
"put it on the tray" should reset "it" to "the tray" in the Inform library.

- Voice recognition might be more complex, as vowels are only sometimes
important, but when they are, they're critical to understanding.  Most other
languages that I've seen are a bit more consistent in their vowel usage.

I'm sure there are others floating around.


