Thanks for your explanation. I only was wondering how you handle the subtile
details in the way you arrange the words in a sentence and make a lot of
diffence or in spoken language the diffent levels of of speechtone that give
exactly the same sentence a complete different meaning like in Chinese?
Or in signlanguage were two experts use the space in front of them to make
gestures in a diffent part of this room, giving it a different nuance?

And real communication lives in these details, every non-native speaker
discovers this problem..



===================
 
A little background for my (old and almost forgotten) interst in this
subject: you can skip it.

In 1981 I was a psychology student with a minor in informatics for the
social sciences.

As final project I created a concept keyboard for a speech-handicaped
person. This person (my little sister in law) was living in a mental
hospital and could hardly communicate...we thought, until we discoverd that
she learned Dutch Sign Language from another (deaf) child on their own...
(In these days Sign Languages was still not done for deaf people in Holland,
although we all new that the use it all the time when they are outside the
view of the staff.. Convention of Milan 1800 or so..) 

I did look for Bliss in this situation, but then again she also only could
speak with the people who also were master in Bliss. (I think this is also
an introduction problem if you want to use it on the normal email-list of
Squeak: where do you show the short list on the screen in an emailprogram?
Yellowpaper on the monitor, yes but we are all human and some of us have a
partner with another concept of a clean desk..)

Back to the story: So I decided to use the picture-book she already knew for
telling at home what se did in the residence home. (she showed us the
pictures, we read the subscripts.) 
My father made a wooden box, my brother made the touchboard and I connected
it to a computer - the cheapest I could afford :Tandy model I,Hongkong
imitation, and a voicesynthesizer Votrax(?) with an American English
text-to-speech algorithm: I tricked the machine to pronounce a soft G like
in my name Ger - I forgot the tric -

On the board she could place A4 papers with a thematic set of pictures on it
(the board could recognise the paper by the holes on the leftside) If she
pointed to a picture, the system pronounced the word and so she could learn
new sets on her own. (lack of Staff to help her was another point.)
We did some tests with Lotto pictures and we both liked this game. 
At the end she said always goodbye to the man in the machine. 
Proudly I made a phonecall to another institute and told the man about my
project: 
"Boy, our patients aren't Monkeys"





-----Original Message-----
From: Richard A. O'Keefe [mailto:ok at atlas.otago.ac.nz]
Sent: Tuesday, February 05, 2002 12:21 AM
To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
Subject: RE: Toch weer antwoord: RE: Antwoord: Squeak
Internationalization (vo orheen: Re: AW: AW: -- Whats this 'AW:' mean?)


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	> -----Original Message-----
I wrote:
	> Bliss had seen war in Europe, and believed that the division of
	> languages was part of the problem.  He wanted to make a notation
	> that *anyone* could communicate in.

G.J.Tielemans at dinkel.utwente.nl replied:
	The dreanm he did share with Esperanto and Ino?
	
If "Ino" means "Ido", which from the little I've seen of it is basically
Esperanto-with-a-spelling-reform, yes, with one big BUT:

    Esperanto is very much a *European* language.  It's not just Indo-
    European, it's Western and Central European, with very little Slavic.

    Last I heard, if you ranked the world's languages by number of speakers,
    Esperanto was in the top 40.  I'm sure the familiarity of much of its
    vocabulary to speakers of European languages helped, but I'm also sure
    the *unfamiliarity* of its vocabulary to speakers of Malayo-Polynesian,
    Chinese, Afro-Asiatic, &c &c &c limited it.  If you are a speaker of
    a non-European language, and you want to learn a European language,
    you might as well learn one with as many other speakers as possible.

Bliss's system is a purely graphical notation with *no* phonetics.
If there's a symbol for someone standing, I could pronounce it "stand"
and a Maaori could pronounce it "tuu", and neither of us would feel that
the other's sound system or vocabulary was "privileged", neither of us would
lose face.

Of course, grammar remains.  In Maaori, "2" is arguably a verb, and that
kind of thing does show through.  But there again, Bliss's system has, as
far as I understand it, its own pidgin-style grammar, just as ASL has its
own autonomous grammar.

	> I agree on that: doggybag, OK, IQ, TV, SHIT, FUCK, are normal
Dutch words
	these days  
	
TV is from "classical/scientific" vocabulary, not English.
The last two of those words are from common Germanic stock, and Dutch
already had very close relatives.  It's really like the way the American
word "bun" seems to be taking over from the English word "bum" in this
country.  (I _hate_ the way our language is being replaced by American.
American is a fine language, for Americans.)