Talking to aliens

Okay, here’s an idea. Not very fully baked yet.

Imagine I’m talking about fishing with some alien friends, and I want to say that I’m glad my friends invited me to this interesting conversation about fishing.

What I actually say is “I thank you-plural-1st.object invite-gerund-2nd.object I-1st.object this interesting conversation-2nd.object fish-gerund-topic.”

Or something. I sort of winged it on those glosses. But my point is, there’s an intermediate language that consists of rules for how the computer should treat words. The words themselves are the same as in the speaker’s native language (assuming someone has filled out the vocabulary spreadsheet for your language).

Maybe I need to read up on programming languages. Or lojban?