Castro told me that the company built a language model in house to harden the speech recognition technology they licensed from another vendor.
Founded by CEO Toby Mather and CTO Adit Trivedi after they paired up at EF in late 2015, Lingumi has built a language learning platform for pre-school kids, initially targeting the teaching of English.
For that purpose, we built a language that can be seen as a generalization of Boolean equations.
Recently, we went to an app development workshop for language documentation at Charles Darwin University, sponsored by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, where I worked with app developers and linguists to build a language lesson and teaching app.
But Cardew's bigger idea, that an improviser can build a language out of anything without relying on an established sound or idiom, was the night's guiding principle.
They are without any possessions, relationships, or even memories from their previous lives, and they have to build a language to function as they learn to survive within the bounds of the faceless bureaucracy that rules their new home.
"She really tried to understand what was our vocabulary, because she was very sure about her vocabulary, and she wanted, maybe, to build a language with those two identities," said one of the dancers, Nicholas Le Riche.
In "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins," the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges writes about a 17th-century polymath who builds a language to organize all human ideas, "where the name of each thing says all the details of its destiny, past and future".
Argentinian writer Andrés Neuman, one of Granta's best young Spanish language novelists, was shortlisted for the epic Traveller of the Century – an apt choice for a prize rewarding literature in translation, as it deals with an affair between two literary translators, who together "build a language of understanding as they work to translate European poetry".
"The common ancestor of five or six million years ago would have been utterly incapable of a telephone conversation but would have been able to make voluntary movements of the hands and face that could at least serve as a platform upon which to build a language," he writes.
Story-based questioning and discussion works well to build a language for emotions, especially when the teacher and student work together to explore what caused a character to act or feel as they did, and the consequences of their actions and emotions.
