Attempto Controlled English
Starting in about the 11th century, philosophers in India of the Navya-Nyāya school adopted a similar artificial dialect of Sanskrit, to make their arguments precise. Of course there was no computer implementation backing the formalization, but the goal was similar: to have a language that remains a subset of natural language and (somewhat) intelligible to a typical educated person, yet is a formal language with unambiguous meanings. A good description of this language is in a couple of papers by Ganeri [1].For example (taken from [2]), instead of saying the straightforward “Caitra goes to the village”, if you wished to be really precise you might say “There is an activity which leads to a connection-activity which has as Agent no one other than Caitra, specified by singularity, [which] is taking place in the present and which has as Object something not different from ‘village’.” (Sounds a bit less unnatural and also a bit less confusing in Sanskrit.)> [Attempto Controlled English] can serve as knowledge representation…It is not clear to me when this project started, but there was a 1985 article pointing out the Navya-Nyāya/“Shastric Sanskrit” language as an example of something that is both (somewhat) a natural language and (somewhat) usable for knowledge representation [2]. In its own way that article became, in popular culture in some circles in India, the source of various unfounded memes about Sanskrit being good for computers, or more absurd claims (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14295285).[1]: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pollock/sks/papers/Ganeri... (can't find a link to the second paper now)[2]: https://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/4...