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Starting in about the 11th century, philosophers in India of the Navya-Nyāya school adopted a similar artificial dialect of Sanskrit, to make their arguments pr
by svat 7y ago
Starting in about the 11th century, philosophers in India of the Navya-Nyāya school adopted a similar artificial dialect of Sanskrit, to make their arguments precise. Of course there was no computer implementation backing the formalization, but the goal was similar: to have a language that remains a subset of natural language and (somewhat) intelligible to a typical educated person, yet is a formal language with unambiguous meanings. A good description of this language is in a couple of papers by Ganeri [1].
For example (taken from [2]), instead of saying the straightforward “Caitra goes to the village”, if you wished to be really precise you might say “There is an activity which leads to a connection-activity which has as Agent no one other than Caitra, specified by singularity, [which] is taking place in the present and which has as Object something not different from ‘village’.” (Sounds a bit less unnatural and also a bit less confusing in Sanskrit.)
> [Attempto Controlled English] can serve as knowledge representation…
It is not clear to me when this project started, but there was a 1985 article pointing out the Navya-Nyāya/“Shastric Sanskrit” language as an example of something that is both (somewhat) a natural language and (somewhat) usable for knowledge representation [2]. In its own way that article became, in popular culture in some circles in India, the source of various unfounded memes about Sanskrit being good for computers, or more absurd claims (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14295285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14295285).
[1]: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pollock/sks/papers/Ganeri(Matilal%20vol).pdf http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pollock/sks/papers/Ganeri... (can't find a link to the second paper now)
[2]: https://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/466 https://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/4...
- elboru 7y agoIt would be great to use that kind of language in software development, I think it would avoid a lot of bugs and discussions between QAs and developers.
- vinceguidry 7y agoI believe Latin was still being used for theological discourse in Europe well into the 1700s for that same reason, precision. Something nice about a dead language is the meanings of the words don't have a way to change from under you.
- jquinby 7y agoIndeed, Ecclesial Latin is still the official language of the Catholic Church, inasmuch as documents like papal encyclicals are published in Latin first before translation to other languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastical_Latin#Current_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastical_Latin#Current_u...
- schoen 7y agoHowever, I don't think the people using Latin for these purposes really think that logical precision is an important reason to do so. The Vatican Latinist I briefly studied with, Reginald Foster, doesn't seem to think that way -- he regularly made fun of people who acted as if "Latin came down from heaven in a gold box". You might say that the use of Latin has a benefit of precision for the Catholic Church because there are some familiar theological and ecclesiological terms available whose meaning should be clear and which can be matched up with similar vocabulary in older Christian texts. Still, these texts are not using some kind of formal logic, and they don't do a more careful job of avoiding ambiguities than lawyers drafting legislation or contracts in modern languages do.
- posterboy 7y agothen these texts must be really horrible to read and no less bug ridden than any reasonably sized code-base, except that any bug is swiftly explained away as a feature by the commanding authority. Whether bear arms or it fell like scales from his eyes, this stuff doesn't age well, which is pretty much the point. To be fair, though: The later bit is from Greek; but why not tomatoes, huh?
- schoen 7y ago
- empath75 7y agoThere were also European attempts: [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_Towards_a_Real_Character,_and_a_Philosophical_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_Towards_a_Real_Charac...