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Comment by david_ar | Hacker News Reader

I really like this approach (even if I'm still not entirely convinced about the benefits of dotsies).

For a while, I've had this idea of a book that starts in standard English, and gradually alters the grammar and introduces new words - so that halfway-through it's written in somewhat of a pidgin/creole language, and by the end you're reading a completely different language (e.g. French or Japanese). I'm not aware of such a thing existing, or even being feasible for that matter, but I think it would be interesting.

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Similar: Giuseppe Peano (the mathematician) proposed that a variation of Latin be used as an international and scientific language—in particular, a version that dropped all the affixes at the end of words and relied wholly on word order instead of inflection, which he called Interlingua[1] and has since come to be known as Latino sine Flexione (Latin without inflections). His article which introduced the idea started in Latin and gradually dropped different inflections as he discussed them, so by the end, his article was written in Latino sine Flexione[2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latino_sine_flexione not to be confused with the other international auxiliary language called Interlingua which is also a generic Romance language. [2]: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35803/35803-h/35803-h.htm

I wonder to what extent you could do this automatically given a text in two languages (e.g. Harry Potter). From a quick google it looks as though text alignment might fall in the category of "possible" NLP problems[1], so it might be feasible on the sentence level..

[1] http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/J/J93/J93-1006.pdf

Your idea would be much more practical for French than Japanese. Even though there are some changes of word order and grammatical forms in Romance languages that don't directly correspond to English, the differences between English and Japanese seem likely to be irreconcilable into any kind of pidgin dialect. On the other hand, there are far more cognates between English and Japanese.

I had a similar thought a while back when reading "A Clockwork Orange". On page one the slang ("droogs", "horrorshow", "moloko", ...) is rather jarring and it's not entirely clear what it all means, but over time the meaning becomes apparent.

Ah yes, it's fun to say those words while listening to a little of the old Ludwig Van. Maybe even a little of the old in and - alright I'll stop there.

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/steele.pdf by Guy Steele is a little like that.

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