Hello,
Ultra Hal, without modification, can learn to chat in many languages other than English. Ultra Hal can definitely learn French.
It is true that Ultra Hal has over 40 different learning routines, and many of them use English words and grammar. However, Ultra Hal's core learning capability is language-neutral.
There are challenges to using Ultra-Hal in languages other than English, and they are as follows:
1. Ultra-Hal needs pronoun-reversals put into his "substitutions.brn" database for the additional language, in order to converse smoothly. In other postings (search under "Ferguson" on this forum) I explain how to make pronoun reversals work. Making a list of non-English pronoun reversals requires a person with excellent grammar skills in the target language.
If no one is available with excellent grammar skills to make the pronoun reversals list, it would still be possible to improve Ultra Hal's core learning ability with a PARTIAL pronoun reversal list. From the analysis of many conversations, it appears that the most critical reversals would be the non-English equivalents of "my" and "your", and "myself" and "yourself."
(The "trick" to making pronoun reverals work, is to substitute temporary unique place-holders for all the target pronouns, then convert them all to their opposites in a second step. This prevents changing a pronoun, then accidentally changing it back to where it started. For instance, in English, the reversals of " your " and " my " could be changed to " zyourq " and " zmyq " in stage one, and then to " my " and " your " in stage two.)
2. The speech engines that support Ultra-Hal are currently not able to switch back and forth between multiple languages "on the fly." (That would be a really cool capability, and a first!) This means that at any given time, you must choose one language or the other, and if Ultra-Hal makes mixed-lingual remarks, he will mis-pronounce words in the non-selected language.
3. Ultra-Hal contains the equivalent of over 5,000 single-spaced pages of English dialogue, and the structural ability to generate billions of additional remarks. This means that if you want Ultra Hal to learn French, you must be prepared to chat with him patiently for many, many sessions until he "catches on." To hasten this process, you can move Ultra Hal 5.0's learning-control slider to "maximum," which causes Ultra Hal to strongly favor new information over old information.
In summary, I want you to know that it would NOT be necessary to re-write Ultra-Hal's entire program to make Ultra-Hal work in other languages. The core capability is already there.
In my estimation, the two biggest hurdles are the pronoun reversals (requiring someone expert in grammar, and able to grasp the two-step logic), and a whole lot of chatting time.
I hope that this information is interesting and useful to you.
Have a great day!
Sincerely,
Don