David ?Bombe? Roden wrote: > We could substitute words for every n-bit combination, making up funny > sentences, like: > > "The tree" (0x1b) "sits" (0xa8) "under" (0x23) "the car" (0xcc).
"The significant owl hoots in the night." I love this idea. Surrealist poetry as public keys! Basic sentence structures: adj* noun tr-verb adj* noun [adv] [prep adj* noun], adj* noun intr-verb [adv] [prep adj* noun]. One byte per word = 22 words per ref. It should be possible to find 256 nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in any language. On second thoughts there's no reason to have an equal number of each - it's probably easier to find 1024 nouns than 1024 adverbs, so a noun can encode 10 bits. You can encode a few extra bits in the grammatical choices: if an optional adjective occurs it encodes a one, otherwise a zero; same for an optional adverb and an optional preposition-phrase. Translation could be tricky - different languages have different word orders and some require gender agreement - people might autocorrect/misinterpret the words if they're ungrammatical. So for each translation we'd need a file containing the words, their genders, and the word order of the language (SVO etc, pre- or post-modified). Tricky but definitely possible. Cheers, Michael
