John, If the IBM 704 had been one of your first few computers, LISP would be easier for you.
About vocabulary, there are complications. Speakers of one of the Latin dialects, French, Italian, Romanian, Spanish, etc., are more likely to know notionally 'difficult' English words, which have cognates in their languages, than 'simple' ones. They may not know 'fish', but they are all but certain to know 'piscatorial'. (If they know Grimm's laws, they will be able to guess at 'fish' too; but that is now often too much to expect.) Moreover, communication with adult non-native speakers of any language in that language is much better achieved with redundancy than the use of a basic vocabulary. If a non-native speaker does not understand your first effort, try again and again in different ways with different examples. The impact of your doing so will be cumulative. My experience with my children confirmed these notions. I never used a subset of my vocabulary in talking with them, and in the upshot they acquired my vocabulary early on. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
