Compressed language dictionary

A method of translating a command into natural language comprises the steps of: compressing the language words required for all the commands by storing each word once only (Fig. 2) as either a word or subset of a word or of a group of adjoining words in a memory; storing a numeric indicator of each group of words (tokens) which form a natural language string, with position locators; looking up the position locators in response to the command; accessing the memory to retrieve the words from the compressed form; and providing a string of the tokens as a natural language string. The command, via the index in the top part of Fig. 4, obtains from the bottom part of Fig 4 the identifier(s) of the token(s) making up the string. Fig. 3 then gives the location and length of each token, in the compressed memory of Fig. 2.