Calling all linguaphiles

[gusl]

http://gus.editme.com/OntologiesLanguage

I am making a list of concepts to learn in a new language. Not just single word concepts, but also phrases or "speech actions", basically anything you might want to express in your new language. This is a Wiki, so feel free to add your own.

Text manipulation: I haven't found a quick way to hack a Windows script. I got Linux installed yesterday. I just need to figure out how to install g++ to start writing some text-manipulation scripts. Then I need to figure out how to make the network/Internet work.

Once that's done, I'll run the scripts.

apple
banana
carrot

will become

^apple: apple
^banana: banana
^carrot: carrot


When seen through a translation site such as babelfish, these pages will become bilingual glossaries.

^apple: maçã
^banana: banana
^carrot: cenoura


Possible Features:
Left-hand side: either English or New Language.

By caching the translation:
Sorting alphabetically in new language
Human edition for better concept / phrase translations (creates the problem of version control)
See several languages side-by-side, for linguistic interest


As you can see, learning Dutch is inspiring me in many directions...

Comments

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

I think that the way to learn a language is by "growing" a model of the language in my mind. What you would do is have some software that tests you on the languages.

I am optimistic about machines that can tell whether a simple sentence is correct: basic grammar isn't that complicated. But for advanced learners, I'm not so sure.

One of the things I want to do with this Wiki is a collection of sample sentences, some of which are "extensions" of each other.

I helped him.
I helped him stand up.
I tried to help him stand up.
Today, I tried to help him stand up.
He is thankful because today I tried to help him stand up.

(this particular set is really hard in Dutch: words change place at every addition. English has a closer mapping to the "real" semantic space.)

This way, I would like to cover all the major grammatical patterns in universal language. i.e. my set of sentences would exhibit all the major grammatical patterns in every language it's translated to. Thanks to universal grammar, human languages only differ so much. By adding sentences that express many varieties of concepts and semantic structures, I hope to achieve a universal ontology of descriptive language. Well, most novels probably have enough diversity of sentences to accomplish what I want, except for the fact that they lack their construction: so a reader who does not know the language will be a loss trying to understand the sentence by itself; whereas a reader who does not know the language can decypher the sentence step-by-step by looking up the translations of the subsentences.

So maybe what I need is add a corpus of sentences to my Wiki, and then add all their subsentences. Then native speakers of the target language can translate everything.

I think that working with examples such as these is all one needs in order to learn the grammar of descriptive language (e.g. descriptive Dutch) (there are uses of language other than informative utterances, but maybe their grammar is not so different afterall).