Re: VL-TRANS: a favorite saying
Rob Zook 
Mon, 20 Oct 1997 15:16:17 -0500

Well, I found some interesting things hunting around the net. I found
a list of 1600 standard words from the Universal Language Dictionary,
and really cool lojban source file: a list of 1200 words in Arabic, 
Chinese, English, Hindi, Russian and Spanish.

So now all we need to do is to establish some phonomes, establish some
morphological rules of word formation, by which I mean establish what
kind of consonent vowel arraingement one finds in vulcan words. In
Hawaiian for example words have this kind of morphological rule CVCVCVCV
where each syllable usually has only one consonent and one vowel. In
Lojban the rule is exclusively CCVCV or CVCCV.

Many natural languages unlike Hawaiian have many such rules. So a 
question to start us off - how many such rules should Vulcan have?

Alternatively maybe we should simply catalogue the various examples in
the Zvelebil Corpus and use them as the working set of rules.

Once we have that using my program we could easily create over a 
thousand words to add to the dictionary. Then we should have sufficient
vocabular to make translations practical. Personally I would like my 
first project to be a translation of _The Guidlines_, but we simply
do not have the words quite yet.

One key note I think important, for effective communication we should
have no points of ambiguity. It would not seem logical that the Vulcans
after the reformation would embrace c'thia as a way of being and yet
keep speaking a language with ambiguities.


Rob Z.
--------------------------------------------------------
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps 
it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step 
to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. 
-- Henry David Thoreau