Eric Walker <[email protected]> wrote:
> Can I just say how cool it is that someone can point to a blog post in > Italian, and the non-Italian speakers can go read a decent automatic > translation of it without skipping a beat, as though they were reading a > post written in English? > Well, the quality not that good, but it is remarkable that works at all. As you say this ability snuck up on us over time. Machine translation works well with Italian, Swedish and other European languages. It does not work well with Japanese or Chinese. That is what you would expect from linguistics. The "difficulty" or a foreign language is a function of how different it is from your native language. How far apart the "roots" are. We know that no language is inherently difficult because children master their own language by age 5. It is less well known that no language is inherently easy. They all include complexities, for reasons I do not think linguists understand. - Jed
