CEnglish - A New Computer Language

Back Ground:

We have today many Computer Languages like BASIC, FORTRAN, PASCAL, C, to name a few of them. But, I wonder why nobody so far has thought of introducing a new 'Communication Language' that would have eased 'Text-to-Speech' and 'Speech-to-Text' conversions and could have been used for communicating with Robots. Unfortunately, the world we live in today is so much fragmented by multiple languages that it looks highly impossible to adopt any single language for computer based communications. However, with the increasing applications of computers in our day to day life, introduction of a standardized communication language for computer applications will ultimately turnout to be the single unifying thread for our present day world, torn into pieces by language barriers.

May be in the olden days, Emperors and Kings used to encourage development of Regional Languages in order to establish their identity and to partly ensure security by isolating the people on language basis.But today, we are promoting the concept of 'Global Village' and the Governments are busy, trying to integrate the world resources under a single umbrella for the benefit of the humanity as a whole. Fortunately for us, the Computers, and Communication Technology such as Internet and Mobile Phones, have largely contributed their share for the cause of 'Global Integration'. The need of the hour is, therefore, to adopt a standard language for computer communication for the whole world.

Preferred Attributes of the Computer Language :

- The language should be as close as possible to a popular language such as English, say ' CEnglish' so that it is easy for majority of people to learn and use.
- The words used should have only one meaning per pronunciation of the word.
- The spellings and pronunciations should match exactly.
- There should be a standard way of deriving different usages of words, like singular, plural, past tense, present tense etc.from the basic words.

An Implementation Exercise for CEngligh Dictionary :

This exercise is only to explore the tip of the ice berg of the stupendous task involved in adopting a popular language such as English for computer communication purposes.

- Adoption of only single words with unique pronunciation :

Let us now take a simple word like 'write'. Since we want to avoid similar sounding words from our new 'Dictionary', we have to consider reassignment of the present word 'right' also. So, we totally reject the word 'write' from our dictionary and replace it with the word 'pen' as verb. Now, coming to the word 'right', it is used in many contexts. Let us consider two of them for the time being, viz., meaning 'correct' as in 'You are Right' and also for indicating direction as in ' Right Side'. So, in this case we will retain the word 'Right' to indicate only direction in our new dictionary and will decide to use the word 'Correct' to indicate the correctness of an action or a statement.

- One-to-one Matching of Spellings with Pronunciation :

This is a very difficult criteria to implement using a standard language. But if we have the will, we should be able to come out of our worm hole of mental block and find an acceptable solution to the problem. After all, CEnglish being a derivative of our well known English language, should be much easier for any one to learn compared to any of the existing computer languages. So, now let us take two words, viz., 'Cut' and 'Put'. If we decide to retain 'put' in our dictionary, meaning the letter 'U' will always be used as in 'put', we should either remove totally the word 'Cut' from our dictionary and use an equivalent word, say 'slice', or, we could add a new letter to our 'Alphabets', which in combination with the letter 'T' will give the pronunciation of 'UTT'. May be, to use one of the standard keyboard characters, we may decide to adopt '$' sign and the word 'Cut' will be spelt as 'C$t'. Alternatively we may use 'Kat' for 'Cut'. In any case, by doing so, we can keep the 'Cat' and 'Rat' intact in our dictionary.

- Standard way of Deriving Word Variants :

We decide to retain common usage for 'Nouns' and 'Verbs' as in the case of the word 'pen', since the usage of such words in a sentence can be easily interpreted as in 'I pen this letter' and 'This is my pen'. Also we may accept to make plural nouns by adding letter 'S' to noun as in 'Pens'. In order to get the past tense from a verb, we use the word 'did' along with the verb and to get the future tense, we could use the word 'will', uniformly for all verbs. For example, we may use the verb 'pen' in each of these contexts as follows:

'I did pen this letter' to show past tense,

' I can pen this letter in five minutes' for present tense and

'I will pen this letter tomorrow' for future tense.

One may come across many more requirements and restrictions for such a language and deriving it from a standard language is going to be a herculean task. But I still feel, it is worth while to spend time and efforts in this direction to make our future 'Man Machine Interaction' an easy process and to evolve a Universal Communication Language of the future. May be, we could design a computer program to automate this process of dictionary generation. After all, our forefathers have created a multitude of languages without having access to any of the computing tools available today. A modern language like this, with high level of clarity, will have great value in Legal applications also.

Readers, what do you think ?......give your views.