Ruly English

Computers have giant memories, but are exasperatingly literal-minded. The U.S. Patent Office encountered this problem in an acute form when it began planning a computer designed to extract from its memory all earlier mentions of a patent-seeking idea. Patents are described in ordinary English, and ordinary English proved too imprecise for literal-minded computers. The word glass, for instance, means a material and a long list of things made out of that material. It also means additional things (water glasses and eyeglasses made of plastic) that have nothing to do with glass. Such things confuse computers.

To leap this communication barrier, Engineer-Lawyer Simon M. Newman of the Patent Office has been working out a synthetic language called Ruly English that is especially adapted to a computer's huge but simple brain; unlike ordinary, "unruly" English, it gives one and only one meaning to each word.

Newman has found prepositions especially unruly. There are about 25 of them, and their meanings overlap irrationally. The preposition through has at least 13 meanings. It can mean by use of (to speak through an interpreter) and finished with (through with work). Newman proposes to replace unruly prepositions with new Ruly terms that have single meanings. Howby, for instance, will mean mode of proximate cause. Sometimes it will replace by (take by force), or with (to kill with kindness), or through (to cure through surgery). But it will always have the same basic meaning, so that even the most literal-minded computer will not be led astray.

More complicated words of Ruly English are meant to eliminate confusion caused by differing points of view. Both a watch spring and a heavy bridge girder are flexible in some degree. Both are also somewhat rigid. All objects, in fact, lie somewhere on the scale between extreme flexibility and extreme rigidity. So Newman has arbitrarily coined the Ruly word resilrig to cover the whole scale, and has added such prefixes as sli (slightly) and mb (substantially). In Ruly English, a bridge girder would be sliresilrig and a watch spring subresilrig. A properly trained computer would know the meaning exactly. It would not be confused by the fact that in unruly English a very flexible bridge is not nearly as flexible as a very rigid watch spring.

Humans are not expected to read or speak Ruly English. To them, unruly English will always be more ruly.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.