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copied!<p>It would be huge. Probably not possible.</p> <p>Human languages are interpreted by "analog" creatures in (generally) a very forgiving way, not by dumb digital machines that can insist that rules be followed. They do tend to have some kind of underlying structure, but exceptions abound. Really the only "rule" is to make it possible for others to understand you. </p> <p>Even among biological languages, English would be about the worst possible choice, because of its history. It started probably as a pidgen of various different Germanic languages (with attendent simplifications), then had a large amount of French overlaid onto it after the Norman Conquest, then had bits and peices of nearly every language in the world grafted onto it.</p> <p>To give you some idea of the scale we are talking about, let's assume we can consider dictionaries to be your list of terminals for a human language. The only major work that makes a passable stab at being comprehensive for English is the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary" rel="nofollow">Oxford English Dictionary</a>, which contains more than <strong>half a million</strong> entries. However, very few people probably know more than 1/10th of them. That means that if you picked out random words from the OED and built sentences out of them, most English speakers would have trouble even recognizing the result as English. </p> <p>Different groups of speakers tend to know different sets of words too. So just about every user of the language learns to tailor their vocabulary (list of used terminals) to their audience. I speak very differently to my buddies from the "wrong side of the tracks" than I do with my family, and different still than I do here on SO.</p>

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