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Re: [engelang] Re: Self-segmenting words & the treatment of names



Rick Morneau, On 13/05/2006 17:51:
If you're trying to quote foreign words in a written text, just use
special symbols that are reserved for this purpose, such as angle
brackets or square brackets or even a combination of symbols.

If you're talking to a human, you don't need to worry about
self-segregation.

However, if you're talking to a computer, how is the computer going to
deal with the speech that appears between the spoken brackets?  Speech
recognizers are designed to understand only one language.  The computer
can, of course, simply record the foreign expression so that it can play
it back later, but it won't be able to transcribe it for further
processing.

For me, the value of unambiguous segregability is that it is a prerequisite for a language that is unambiguous.
The foreign text would parse as a single grammatical unit with no visible internal content, but it must still be demarcated from the surrounding text.

---And.