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Is English such a mess partly because humans are highly intelligent and can handle the mess? If humans were not so smart, wouldn't evolution prune away languag

Is English such a mess partly because humans are highly intelligent and can handle the mess? If humans were not so smart, wouldn't evolution prune away languages that are too messy?

Gormo 17y ago
I'd bet innate intelligence mostly works on heuristics. It's interesting how English especially has evolved to consistently reduce complexity. We've lost gender, all noun inflection, some verb tenses, etc., which are exactly the tools that keep a language well-ordered and unambiguous. We've reduced clear structure and precision, but increased in flexibility. Of course, making sense out of ambiguous, constantly-changing, and often contradictory things is the goal of most intellectual pursuits, and as we augment our intelligence with tools like Google, we need less and less to put things precisely into a priori categories or define complex systems of rules in general.
BoppreH 17y ago
English is a mess compared to programming languages. As a natural one it is one of the simplest. The "search and replace" tips given in the article would fail in most languages. From the top of my head I can think of 4 different ways to say "There was" in Portuguese, and I bet there are many more. Not that it's good or bad. It's just a characteristic.
- lmkg 17y ago
  > As a natural one [English] is one of the simplest. Strongly disagree. I think it's one of the most baroque, with too many special cases, irregulars, and gotchas. It doesn't have specific types of complexity. For example, its morphology[1] seems pretty bare, at least if you compare it to other Indo-European languages, but even there it's more complex than Japanese or native Hawaiian. To your point, that makes it mostly amenable to search-and-replace filters, which is convenient. [1] Changes to the word reflecting grammatical usage, such as "-ness" signifying a noun or "-ed" signifying a past tense. These are usually the bits of other languages that English-speakers think are "hard."

Is English such a mess partly because humans are highly intelligent and can handle the mess? If humans were not so smart, wouldn't evolution prune away languages that are too messy?

Gormo 17y ago

I'd bet innate intelligence mostly works on heuristics. It's interesting how English especially has evolved to consistently reduce complexity. We've lost gender, all noun inflection, some verb tenses, etc., which are exactly the tools that keep a language well-ordered and unambiguous. We've reduced clear structure and precision, but increased in flexibility. Of course, making sense out of ambiguous, constantly-changing, and often contradictory things is the goal of most intellectual pursuits, and as we augment our intelligence with tools like Google, we need less and less to put things precisely into a priori categories or define complex systems of rules in general.

BoppreH 17y ago

English is a mess compared to programming languages. As a natural one it is one of the simplest. The "search and replace" tips given in the article would fail in most languages. From the top of my head I can think of 4 different ways to say "There was" in Portuguese, and I bet there are many more. Not that it's good or bad. It's just a characteristic.

lmkg 17y ago
> As a natural one [English] is one of the simplest. Strongly disagree. I think it's one of the most baroque, with too many special cases, irregulars, and gotchas. It doesn't have specific types of complexity. For example, its morphology[1] seems pretty bare, at least if you compare it to other Indo-European languages, but even there it's more complex than Japanese or native Hawaiian. To your point, that makes it mostly amenable to search-and-replace filters, which is convenient. [1] Changes to the word reflecting grammatical usage, such as "-ness" signifying a noun or "-ed" signifying a past tense. These are usually the bits of other languages that English-speakers think are "hard."