New auxlang: Atlas

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Re: New auxlang: Atlas

Postby tommus » Tue Sep 12, 2017 7:01 pm

Another update to the Atlas Popup Dictionary. Sorry for the frequent versions, but each one is an improvement. This update was easier and faster to implement than I thought.

Link: 2017-09-12 Atlas Popup Dictionary V4.1

The previous V4.0 had the function to search for possible Atlas translations of English words. It did a deep search and displayed up to 50 matches. That can be too many. Version 4.1 now looks for whole words only; if you type "bank" and hit "return", it will find "bank account", but not "bankrupt". If you type "air", it will find the Atlas word for "air". However, if you then press the button "Deep Search", it will also find "aircraft", "airport", but also "fair" and "hair" etc. So it gives two levels of search.
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Re: New auxlang: Atlas

Postby tommus » Sat Sep 16, 2017 12:17 am

I am working on the Atlas sentences found in the grammar and I believe there are a few corrections that still have to be made in the following sentences:

esas ? Di esas mohi, vi wen wottenet – You are wet, it must have been raining (hypothesis)
kaqat ? Wi kaqat no di doret – I was working while you were sleeping.
li ? Zilar zares li al-batu eu te – She is in the house now.
Qing ? Qing, di tik duses ti wo wi dizet – Please, do it as I said.
qing ? qing, di tik komez vo 7 qe – please, come before 7 o’clock.
varat ? Aisha varat wa al-vinu – Aisha was waiting outside the shop.
vesas ? Win vesas zu Moskobu – We are going to Moscow.
Wien ? Wien vesez ei ce, no di – We will go there, including you.
zei ? e zei xat komes, wi xat avaveses– if he came, I would go away (conditional sentence)
zei ? e zei xat komes, wi avaveses– if he came, I would go away (conditional sentence)

As well, the version of the popup dictionary on the Atlas website is two versions out of date. The current version is shown in the post above, and it has a number of new features.
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Re: New auxlang: Atlas

Postby Rodiniye » Sat Sep 16, 2017 9:22 pm

Sorry Tommus, extremely busy weekend at work. I will update everything tomorrow.

I even wrote a new post about countries, but I did not even have time to share it with you!

Here it is:

http://atlas-language.blogspot.com.es/2 ... tries.html

And tomorrow night I will update everything!
Thanks!
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Re: New auxlang: Atlas

Postby tommus » Mon Sep 18, 2017 12:08 am

Proper names in Atlas:

With the country names now appearing on the Atlas website, more proper names are sure to follow. And there will be a lot of them, with various numbers of letters. Many of them may well include Atlas 3-letter roots inside them. If they appear within a sentence, and start with a capital letter, they will be easy to spot. Not so easy if they are the first word of a sentence with a capital.For people to read and write Atlas proper names will probably be relatively easy. For a computer to figure out if they are a proper name, not so easy.

I suppose the computer can always take the first word of a sentence and initially look for it in a list of proper names. But there will be many, many proper names (such as people, rivers, mountains, businesses, etc.) that will not be in a list of Atlas proper names. So if the computer can't find the first word of a sentence in the list, it must conclude that it probably is an Atlas word that starts with a capital letter because it is the first word of a sentence. Then the computer must try to parse it. If the computer cannot parse it, it can just leave it as is, either an unknown proper name or an unknown Atlas word. But if the computer can parse it or partially parse it, that will produce random results, almost always bad and/or nonsensical.

So, thinking out loud, is there anything we can do to make proper names easy to figure out?

Possibilities (but not necessarily worth considering):

Portugale (current name)
P-ortugale
PPortugale
POrtugale
PortugalE
Portugalee

Possibly we could have all proper names end in a double letter, and ensure that no normal word could ever end with that double letter. So perhaps we could have all proper names, including peoples' names end double letters from a list of double letters, (perhaps only double vowels) such as:

aa
ee
ii
oo
uu

I did a computer search of all the current Atlas words, roots, derived words, words in the texts, etc., and I didn't find any that ended in anuy of those double vowel.

This feature could give Atlas a trademark look. Comments, suggestions?
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Re: New auxlang: Atlas

Postby tommus » Mon Sep 18, 2017 5:45 pm

I have now completed 4,000 of the 8,417 derived roots. It is slow, tedious and only partially satisfying work. I am not deleting any of the computer generated words; rather, I am correcting the spelling and the words in the translations. This mostly involved verbs, adverbs and adjectives. That is where the main value to this edit resides.

I am leaving in the nonsensical words because:

1. It is often difficult to decide if a word, especially a noun is truly nonsensical, or if some writer or speaker might make the word because it made sense in that situation. As I said before, these words and their translations will only appear if someone clicks on such an Atlas word in the popup dictionary. I will not use the nonsensical words in the other direction (EN to AT).

2. There are many of them.

Here are some comments and corrections that popped up during the editing so far. I may have mentioned some of these before:

1. Two words for "work" (kam, kaq). I don't really see a difference in the two.
2. Two words for "long" (lam, lan). One is for distance and one is for time. I don't see the value of having both. Having two will cause errors.
3. Two words for "light" (luz=light, as in bright, etc) (liq= light, as in light weight). These are truly different, but their different meanings should be shown in the vocabulary.
4. Two words for "wet" (laq, moh). They seem to be identical
5. laqdixu (...) is an error or there is something missing in the vocabulary.
6. In the vocabulary, "men" (mind) seems to mean "mind" in the sense of "mind the store" or "mind the gap". But it is not clarified. There should be some other word for mind (as in human mind).
7. There are probably quite a few Atlas roots that translate to the same or similar English word where the English word can have two or more distinctly different meanings (such as "mind"). Somehow, we need to clarify these distinctions in the vocabulary.

Since Atlas has the very powerful feature of being able to add any logical suffix to a root to make a word, it sometimes makes a whole phrase. In other words, it may take several words to translate it. Two examples:

mem (same)
memez (literally "is "saming", = will be making 'something' the same)
nak (relationship)
nakes (literally "is relationshipping", = is making a relationship)

Thus the question: Is this OK in Atlas? Or should you only use "vazes nake", for example?

Spelling error in the vocabulary (inteligence should be intelligence).

In the grammarat the beginning of Phraseology:

sahe/bike/sere/noce bani
good
morning/afternoon/evening
/night

This would be clearer as:

sahe bani/bike bani/sere bani/noce bani
good morning/good afternoon/good evening/good night
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Re: New auxlang: Atlas

Postby Rodiniye » Mon Sep 18, 2017 9:52 pm

Great suggestions there Tommus, I will make the corrections tomorrow.

As for the proper names, my first idea is that they are easy to identify both for computers and for humans, because:
1) First letter is a capital letter.
2) They do not follow the usual Atlas patterns. Take "Portugale" for instance, it does not ressemble any Atlas common word. POR+TUG would be possible, but "ale" is not.
3) these words are very limited, so easily included in glossaries etc?

But let's see what Crush says.

On top of this, I have now added your dictionary version to the blog!


Thus the question: Is this OK in Atlas? Or should you only use "vazes nake", for example?


That is perfectly possible in Atlas, it is one of its main features! :D
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Re: New auxlang: Atlas

Postby crush » Tue Sep 19, 2017 10:07 pm

I think the current method is fine, though i wouldn't be against adding an ending (eg. "dex") to mark countries. That would solve the parsing issue for computers, though i don't think it currently presents an issue for humans. I'm not sure i really understand why you separate u/e for cities/countries, i think you can see a country just the same as a city. I'd leave them the same for both, unless you really think it's worthwhile. I'd use 'u', but i guess it's not a huge deal. I don't really think the double letter idea would work out as well, a possibility could be a prefix similar to al, du, and ha to mark a proper noun, eg. 'xe', which doesn't (yet) have a standard Atlas word: xe-John, xe-Kristov, xe-Houston, xe-Barcelona, etc. Certain larger cities will likely have standard names (similar to Esperanto), smaller cities will probably either be left alone or just be adapted to Atlas pronunciation.

Also, i'd like to see something mentioned on how to make languages and people (i imagine doica would be a German person, for example, and doicvale might be the German language).
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Re: New auxlang: Atlas

Postby tommus » Wed Sep 20, 2017 12:59 am

Concerning proper names, I guess I can figure out how to parse them when they start a sentence. It means that every word that starts with a capital letter has to first be searched for as a possible proper name. That happens in many (most) languages. It must be a real challenge in German. One slight advantage with Atlas, all authorized Atlas proper names can be made unique from other words. But peoples' names, business names, product names, etc. could be the same as a regular Atlas word. But again, that happens in many languages. So I am OK with the present Atlas proper names in that regard. I agree with crush that cities and countries probably should have the same ending. That probably should also include regions, municipalities, provinces, states, etc. I'm not sure that "seeing" should be the deciding factor between concrete and abstract. I think it should be more "is it tangible?" In other words, does it physically exist, could be seen, touched, visited, etc. So countries, cities, regions, etc would be concrete, but organizations such as the United Nations would be abstract. The United Kingdom would be concrete but the UN would be abstract. It is not going to be a big deal if some things in the gray areas in between sometimes go one way and sometimes the other.
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Re: New auxlang: Atlas

Postby Rodiniye » Thu Sep 21, 2017 10:13 pm

But peoples' names, business names, product names, etc. could be the same as a regular Atlas word


Although it might not be needed at the moment, Crush suggestion about adding "xe-" at the beginning might be a good tool for these cases. We will see how it evolves.

I'm not sure that "seeing" should be the deciding factor between concrete and abstract.


It is just a convention, so it does not matter too much. However, it is what I said. "countries" are not physically there, they are just human inventions. So you can see a city, but take a plane and cross South America or Europe and try to see the borders between, let's say, France and Germany. Impossible!

Also, i'd like to see something mentioned on how to make languages and people (i imagine doica would be a German person, for example, and doicvale might be the German language).


It will be coming in the following updates! :D

I think the current method is fine, though i wouldn't be against adding an ending (eg. "dex") to mark countries


I opted for not marking countries as the unmarked form. Then languages will be adding -val, etc.

However the use of "des" might be good when there is confussion, or.... we'll see!

PS: Yep, "dexu" became "desu" after the grammar and dictionary update! :roll:
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Re: New auxlang: Atlas

Postby crush » Fri Sep 22, 2017 1:21 am

But could you see a city? I don't think you could see where one starts and one ends either, cities are just as much an invention as countries.
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