Other properties claimed for the "lojban" artificial human language: 1. No homonyms. In English "it's" and "its" and "heard" and "herd" sound the same. In lojban that never happens. 2. Also true for multiword phrases. E.g. in English, "cargo shipment" and "car go shipment" and "cargo ship meant" all sound same... In lojban that never happens. Supposedly from the syllable sequence you always can deduce a unique word sequence. This suggests lojban well suited for computer continuous-speech recognition. 3. English contains many ambiguities where it is possible to parse a sentence in more than one valid way-- having different meanings. They give as an example "Time flies like an arrow." Which is the verb -- time, flies, or like? Other examples are where it is unclear which words modifies which others. In lojban there is always exactly one valid parse. Indeed, a computer program was written, where you input your alleged lojban sentence, and computer outputs "that was a valid lojban sentence (or not)" along with some information about the sentence if it was valid. As far as I know, it has not been possible to construct such a computer program for any other human language. This not only would make lojban well suited for computer-human communication, but also for scientific writing where ambiguity is often a big problem. 4. But speakers still can say ambiguous things in lojban by use of "ellipses" where information is intentionally omitted. At least one linguist has complained she found lojban to be TOO unambiguous and logical, which was a pain. Nevertheless the fact at least one fluent lojban speaker exists proves this obstacle is not insurmountable. So, interesting. In other news, it turns out various mathematicians have been involved in the artificial language kooky-world, including Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hildegard_of_Bingen Isaac Newton (sketched a new artificial language in an notebook) Hans Freudenthal (1905-1990; published an artificial language designed for communication with space aliens) Andries Evert Brouwer (who actually was a co-author of mine once) speaks Esperanto with his family... Esperanto is the most widely-spoken artificial language (the second apparently is "Klingon" created for the TV show "Star trek"!) and there are at least a few people whose first language is Esperanto. (Such as, I guess, Brouwer's children, if he has any.) Probably fewer than 1000, though. Esperanto supposedly was going to cause World Peace. Apparently it is not regarded as all that well designed (indeed its creator later endorsed "Ido" which was intended to fix the most obvious flaws in Esperanto) but it still looked clear to me on naive inspection that Esperanto was more sensible than any actual language.