> Machine translation would be almost impeccable. This is completely wrong. Current machine translation struggles not because languages are hard, but because t

> Machine translation would be almost impeccable. This is completely wrong. Current machine translation struggles not because languages are hard, but because translation is an inherently hard problem. Humans can only translate reasonably after years of training. Semanticists can only provide a formal logical treatment of very small fragments of language, which indicates that a logical language would be either incomplete or not completely formal. The bottom line is that translation involves understanding meaning, which involves a lot of interpretation and world knowledge, which is very difficult to put into a computer, whatever the kind of language you're trying to translate. Compared to this, speech recognition has been relatively successful, so a language with a phonemic alphabet is not very urgent.