In Europe, it is planned that the ECU will become a currency that will be recognized in all countries in the European Community. By means of this currency, people will have, even in the smallest and most remote places, funds for immediate use. The intrinsic value of their national currency will be just as great as it ever was, but because of the difficulties and delays of exchange, an international currency medium which is immediately available and which passes at a definitely understood and agreed upon rate, will be a great time saver and aid to travel.
Does this situation parallel that in languages? By means of an international auxiliary language, man could have the benefit of an exchange of ideas without the delay and inconvenience of translation. The exchange of ideas would then become immediate and in terms which would be commonly understood.
VIL, Visual Inter Lingua, is a computer-based iconic communication language, that allows people to communicate with each other when they share no common language. It allows a user to construct sentences, without actually having to type in words, i.e. solely relying on icons. The goal is to make the system language independent so that it can be used universally. So, the system should be able to be used to construct sentences irrespective of the languages known by the users.
Our research into universal languages and iconic communication, together with our program that implements an iconic language, will have several contributions:
1. We will assemble and design a set of principles, some of which will be relevant for any universal language, other are specific to visual or iconic languages. These principles can be used by others in the field as guidelines and will have different degrees of specificity. Many of these principles, however, cannot be evaluated, but have to be argued for.
2. We will have designed a language and an internationally recognizable set of icons to represent both abstract and concrete meanings.
3. We will have implemented an iconic communication language, VIL.
4. VIL can demonstrate the viability of a universal visual interlanguage even if every aspect of VIL is not perfect.
5. We will identify those areas which need additional work by means of our evaluation, for example intelligent aids to help the user.
VIL uses it's own (minimal) grammar. In order to come to VIL's grammar, we have researched verbs, nouns, and
adjectives. The organization of the verb system is used in composing VIL's grammar.
See the proposal for various principles for VIL.
The following is a link to a verb classification test. This test has evolved as
part of the research on VIL's verb system. In this test you have to find verbs
in an verb hierarchy that we came up with. The test will tell us whether the
hierarchy is correct and complete:
Verb Classification Page.