2001 Special Issues by Professor Liim Keahioong  (7)
). MLT as an East-West Cultural Exchange Medium
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(Issue) MLT as an EastWest Cultural Exchange Medium, topics: Letter vs. Knowledge and Thought / Cultural Exchange among Races / Speech Communication among Races / A Bridge Language of Races / An Agency Language for East-West Cultural Exchange / the Formal-MLT, a Language for Automated Information Analysis / the Expected Global Peace in the 21-st Century
--Letter vs. Knowledge and Thought

The largest difference between mankind and animals is that man uses language.
People transmit information and even their feeling and thought to others.
The language lets a person get experiences of others, and hence lets him not to fall into distress 
nor to repeat the error of others owing to his ignorance.
The language increases man's wisdom through communication and lets people 
interchange experiences of life, so a common idea and cognizance is cultivated in a crowd of people.
But, without a writing method of the language, it has been impossible to exchange reliably
the opinions among people of different time and space. 
If there were no letters for a race with long standing past, 
then there would not remain any reliable historical facts to the present 
.  What is more, it would be impossible for people of each epoch to search for the thought of ancestors
in order to correct their own conduct today and, even more, to develop
their domain of thought toward the need of new era in the future.

Whenever a person found any trouble on the thought and judgment,
he could go out and ask a superior to give him an advice, then if he could not give him 
an adequate advice, then he could ask another person.
But at the present time, we do instead to search for books.  It is because
there were many great men with high achievements have left their 
knowledge in those books which are now available in the library for our reference. 
 All of these is because we have had the letter.
When we say, a certain race has their own special culture, we may mean at a first glance 
that they prefer a certain style of living, but at a more profound significance, 
we can observe and find that they possess a common literal tradition to let them learn.
We can safely say, therefore, that a system of written language has 
cultivated the culture of a nation. 
As most nowadays linguists insist, the most part of the thought of humankind 
is composed of the soundless language,  that is to say that 
it is composed of abstract concepts written with letters.
Apparently, to understand the character of a race, it is necessary to read widely her historical documents.
It is easily recognizable that a person on trouble will seek in his mind the corresponding 
description which he remembered since his elementary schooling,
and takes responding act in accordance with the described situation.
  =
-Cultural Exchange among Races-
    =
A cultural exchange exists between two races means that both of them have well translated historical documents of the other race to allow the public of his own race to read and understand. 
When we are willing to study another nation's historical tradition with good will and comprehension, 
we will naturally be able to understand their deed and will become positive in accepting them 
beyond the consideration with reason.
Thus we see that the traditional way to achieve the cultural exchange between two nations, 
the following scheme is required. 
  (1)  There should be somebody in this nation to study with all his willingness the language of the other nation, and master it to the degree of his own language. 
  (2) These scholars must go to translate all the traditional documents of the other nation, and rewrite those results in books with their own language.
  (3) They have to introduce these translations to their own public after classified into cultural classes for gradual study. 
  (4) The other nation should do the same endeavor, and take share in the cultural recommendation.
Under this scheme, linguists of nation A will study the language of nation B and translate historical documents of nation B. 
Likewise, linguists of nation B will study the language of nation A and translate 
historical documents of nation A. 
Now, the cultural exchange between Nation A and Nation B is expectable. 
But how about the people of Nation C?
Must their linguists study and master both Language A and Language B?
Do they ask Nations A and B to begin learning Language C?
To prevent such a waste, people began studying only English as the Universal Language of the world.
That is, in order to introduce their own culture to the world, linguists everywhere study English,
and translate their own documents into English for linguists of other nations 
in hope of transmission by these colleagues of other nations.
Unfortunately, some nations in the world, even in Europe, cannot accept English.   The reasons are: 
(1) the Grammatical System of English differs considerably from those grammatical systems 
of the nations, so the study is very difficult for them;
and (2)  the vocabulary is very similar but, like some European nations, the 
inflection rules are quite different to provoke some serious confusion.
  =
Speech Communication among Races

By the end of 19-th century, there were some scholars recognized that the world peace
should rely on the equal communication through the world and the smooth exchange
of idea between all nations.   Hence, more than ten kinds of, so to say, the Interlingua or the 
international languages, were invented in succession.   The effort of such good will was, however, 
disappeared without effect in a short time.
Under the recognition of the importance of the international speech communication,
it was once proposed to assign a purposely simplified English as an international
language, but the proposal also failed.


Up to the present, only the artificial World Language, Esperanto, by 
Dr. Ludviko Lazaro Zamenhof (1859~1917) of Poland remains as a social language among 
international personages.   Dr. Zamenhof was at first an ophthalmologist
having lived for a long time in the country where people were strictly prohibited 
to talk their own mother tongues under the rule of Russian Empire . 
Having observed countless troubles among people of differing
ancestral nationalities in the town, he finally decided to invent
a common language for them for oral communication.
The language Esperanto excludes the arbitrariness in those European natural languages,
as well as phenomena of any departure from the grammatical rules as observed in speech.
It is thus quickly accepted by international men of knowledge and is studied for social communication.
The pronunciation of words is, like the Taiwanese Modern Spelling System (TMSS), 
complies strictly with her spelling which does not compose of unreasonable phonemes.
It is specially easy for study, and what is more, her word is made changeable from one part of speech
to another by changing her ending only, so it becomes a general practice
to make up many words from a common stem.
This decreases tremendously the number of words to remember, and make
the study of the language quite easy.
At the present, there are millions of Esperanto users, called Esperantisto, over the world, 
and there is a collection of more than thirty hundred articles written with 
Esperanto in the British Esperanto Association.
This is now surely a successful speech communication medium among
peoples of different nationalities in Europe.   The scheme of application is as follows:
  (1) People of every race learn Esperanto as the second language.
  (2) In places of international conventions, it is encouraged to speak Esperanto to diminish any racial discrimination and inequality due to the difference of language usage. 
Dr. Zamenhof saw the success of his own invention which has widely spread in a 
mere twenty years.    But he felt in 1905 that the true justice and friendship among races
is not attainable by the unifying effort on languages only, but it is necessary 
to look for the mingling of those religions in order to remove the prejudice and ridiculeamong nations.
This thought is actually a theme in the study of
cultural communication among races.
¡@¡@¡@¡@¡×
-A Bridge Language for Races

In the Middle Age of Europe, people recognized that theLatin language was  the only 
common way of writing.   Similarly in Asia, people knew only the classical Chinese writing.
It has been known that the Latin language was brought to the literal world by
the Great Poet Dante Alighieri (1265~1321) at the time he was looking for a most beautiful language
in Europe.   He found this ideal language in a small town called Latin which is located north to Rome.
After his rearrangement into a literal system, Latin had been used as the only written language 
in Europe till the uprising of provincialism in the age of the Revival of  Learning in 16-th Century.
 (Under a broad sense, Latin is the tongue spoken in Italy since the time before Christ.)
The classical Chinese writing was used since about -1000 BC.   This is the writing system 
with Chinese characters, and its writing style was originated from literatures of Han dynasty 
(about -200 BC).  This had been used as the unified written language in Asia. 
Neither literal Latin nor the classical Chinese was a daily spoken language of the people. 
In those old times, people wrote also their mother tongue anyway.  For instance, Poet Dante 
bequeathed masterpieces "Viva nuova", "Convivio", etc. which were written in Italian.
Both the literal Latin and the classical Chinese are common literal systems for peoples of different 
languages.   In order to guarantee that the documents will not change for ever, 
a dead language with a style of old age is quite convenient. 
A common literal system  has the following prospects:
  (1) Writers of every nation study to arrange the thought in the brain into the unified form of letters, like the literal Latin or the classical Chinese. 
  (2)  Readers who want to get the knowledge read books in the common literal system but translate into their mother tongue in order to understand the meaning. 
Since each nation has her own writing of mother tongue, we can say here that the literal Latin or 
the classical Chinese worked as the bridge among languages of different tongues. 
It is the bridge language for them.
But as a matter of fact, it is quite an authoritative Central Language for those nations..
-An Agency Language for East-West .Cultural  Exchange
    =
Very few Taiwanese scholars in Chinese literature shows the capability of corresponding scholars
in Chinese mainland, so are the Western scholars .
Every race of Asia has paid absolute respect to the five thousand years' documented
achievement in China and has considered it the source of  her own culture.
It is, therefore, impossible to neglect the importance of Chinese (Han) characters,
but its study is extremely difficult for Western people.
In likely way, owing to the difference of life custom, the Oriental people
feel it very difficult to master two or more Western languages.
Under this situation, we cannot expect too much on Oriental and Western people to get good understanding 
on the personality and the attitude on behaviors of the other parties.
Apparently, the world of 21st Century needs an Agency Language which works
as the medium for all over the world including both West and East.  That is:
 Eastern documents   Western documents
| |
Agency  Language
Articles in Eastern ---
Languages   ,   n		 --------------------'-------------------
Translation with dictionary of 
each  race		 ---- Articles in Western 
           Languages
To be an Agency Language, it is not necessary to be a well established excellent language, 
nor to be a natural oral language.   It must besimple in structureandconcise in syntax.
It is desired to be a written language which is 
fully and easily processed by a computer with information science.
Under this idea, we can arrange as follows to attain global communication of document.
 (1) Each nation or race translates her historical documents into the Agency Language 
with the aid of the Artificial Intelligence.
 (2) The resultant documents are stored as Internet data. 
 (3) Any other nation or race in the world is allowed to translate the Agency Language materials from Internet word by word with the aid of computer dictionaries into her
own language.
 (4) The Artificial Intelligence of this side can judge the grammatical characteristics of each word according to the semantic rules of Agency Language.   After completion, a linguist may rewrite the whole document into her own language with his linguistic and literal skill. 
The Artificial Intelligence stated above is necessarily to be programmed with the seyntactic rules of 
the Agency Language only. 
It can be foreseen, however, that some serious problem will happen
in the exact translation of sentimental articles.  A certain word in the original sentence
may correspond to one of several words in the agency language, and a word in the latter may
similarly corresponds to one of several expressions in the natural language of this tribe.
To solve this program, a skill of judgment in accord with the contextual customs of 
the agency language is required.  This topics will become a center of emphasis 
in preparing the computer dictionaries at the next stage. 

The Formal-MLT, a Language for Automated Information Analysis
  =
MLT/TMSS is a language of Latin spelling of words similar to European languages.
As succeeded the Chinese grammar, each word keeps the original form and does not
change its part by grammatical inflection, such as by conjugation, declension, etc. 
The same word can be used without any change in the sentence as noun, verb, adverb etc. 
It is only its position in accordance with the syntactic rules that decides its gramatical effect in this sentence.
These characteristics make MLT/TMSS one of the most ideal written Language for 
automated information processing by a computer.

 For even higher efficiency for computer processing, we can put some more restriction 
on her original grammar and semantics. 
This is to make her more swiftly execute the duty as an Agency Language.
The result is a quite perfect "formal language" of information science. 
Thus we call the result the Formal-MLT, some main points of which are as follows: 
  (1) A simple sentence of MLT is classified into four types.   Type-I is "a Subjective Statement", Type-II is "a Comparative Statement", Type-III is "an Action-Situation Statement";  and Type-IV is "a Requesting".   These are different in their phrase structures.
 (2) Type-I sentence has an exclamation symbol (!) at the end,  Type-II sentence must contain a correlative verb or comparative preposition, Type-IV sentence must contain a request phrase and an action verb(-phrase), and Type-III sentence must contain an adjective(-phrase) or  an action verb(-phrase) and a host noun(-phrase).    These serve as the type recognizets.
 (3) In front of an action verb, there must be an auxiliary verb.  The auxiliary verb decides the tense and state of the followed verb.
 (4) The action verb in Type-III sentence may follow an adverb suffix if it is not preceded by an auxiliary verb. 
 (5) A word expressing time or space is preceded by a prefix "ti" to construct an adverbial phrase.  General phrase structure is as follows.:
(auxiliary verb)¡ò(time phrase)¡ò(space phrase)¡ò(verb)
or  (time phrase)¡ò(space phrase)¡ò(auxiliary verb)¡ò(verb)
The adverb may follow an suffix.
 (6) Adjective A generally takes the form (A)(ee)(N) or (A)(-)(N)¡C   When there are two adjectives Aand B  for a single noun N, it takes the form  (A)(koq)(B)(ee)(N)¡C
 (7) In a noun-phrase or a verb-phrase, the preceding words modify the followed. 
 (9) A complex sentence is constructed by linking simple sentences by (,ar), (,mxkuo), (,koq) etc. 
Modern Literal Taiwanese (MLT) is not the only language to become an Agency Language. 
To our knowledge, however, it is the only language studied for this effect. 
Any natural language in the world can be tried if it can be 
made processable by computer by some minor amendment.
Taiwanese language has a merit, that is, owing to the political oppression for a century, 
she has not have a chance to develop into a complicated language. 
Taiwanese people will not feel unaccustomed even after the "formalization" process stated above is taken.    Many Taiwanese youths are now, like foreigners, just began to learn Taiwanese speech.
The followings are the schemes for translating any Natural Language (NL) into
the Agency Language (AL) and for writing the former from the latter. 
Agency Language(AL) from a Natural Language(NL) Natural Language(NL) from the Agency Language(AL) 
  (1) A sentence of Natural Language (NL) is intersected into some simple sentences.
 (2) Reserve those conjunctions.
 (3) Judge each simple sentence to one of those Types I~IV.
 (4) Find out the central term, as in above
Table of Formal-MLT, from each simple sentence. 
 (5) Referring to the syntax of Formal MLT, arrange those words in sequence.
 (6) Utilizing a (computer) dictionary, translate those words into TMSS. 
 (7) Insert the corresponging TMSS of those reserved conjunctions;  now the transforma-
tion of NL-sentence into Formal-AL-sentence is completed.		   (1) Judge each simple sentence in the Agency Language (AL) to one of those Types I~IV.
 (2) Utilizing a (computer) dictionary, translate those TMSS words into words of your own language. 
 (3) Translate each simple sentence into a 
nice Natural Language of your own, referring to the knowledge of AL syntax.
 (4) Insert adequate conjunctions.
 (5) Keeping the meaning intact, rewrite the result into a nice sentence of your own traditional style;   the transformation of a Formal-AL-sentence into your Natural Language is now completed.
Apparently, the purpose of establishing the agency language is to enable popular citizens of 
every nation to read with their mother tongues and understand without fallacy 
the main documents of all other nations in the world.   It is thus expected to get 
mutual understanding through the exchange of cultures.
Linguists who would like to participate this work need only to master their own mother tongue 
and the appointed Agency Language which is simple in her grammatical system. 
.
The Expected Global Peace in the 21-st Century
  = 
Peace comes from good communication.
The turmoil of the 20-th Century, including those two World Wars, lets people eager for 
a long standing peace of the world. 
Owing to the misunderstanding of some nation toward another nation, the strife of mankind 
is brought about.   We always ask, why they could not explain the misunderstanding beforehand 
and let the mutual misbelief go on limitlessly enlarged, 
and why nobody will hear the explanation nor premises of the other party? 
It could be because we cannot guess what is really in the adversary's mind. 
Distrust makes people unable to communicate.
 What we cannot trust, is not the man came to talk to us, but is the whole nation behind him. 
It is their system of thinking, or is the racial culture of them. 
Westerners cannot read and understand Chinese characters, so they are not ready to accept 
the culture built up with them.
Easterners cannot understand the differing languages and cultures of so many nations in Europe,
Africa, India and the Middle East.
If there were a day when people can openly deliberate others with sympathy,
 and will look back on the rule of might in their own traditional culture and will eliminate it 
with sincere mind, and also are willing to show love and benevolence instead of strength and trick,
 the peaceful coexistence of mankind becomes possible to be expected.
At that time, there will be no necessity of any strife nor squabble among nations. 
A long standing peace in the whole world will then become possible.
   =
MLT as an East-West Cultural Exchange Medium
                    Authorship by Prof. Liim Keahioong on  August 16, 2001