3 ms·

Spoken Languages, Blub, and Convenience

9 points by breily 18y ago

albertcardona 18y ago
Incomplete article, yet starts an interesting discussion topic: are spoken languages also distributed along a power continuum, in a similar way to programming languages? From personal experience: yes. I speak Spanish, Catalan, English and Russian. In my opinion: * English would be php: it's dead easy to mash together just about anything, and grammar and vocabulary are as inventive as you make them. Plus everybody understands it to some extent. * Russian is Lisp: amazingly powerful, but hard to get right and to think in it (at least for a non-native like me -of course I'm biased.) * Spanish is like java: everybody understands a bit of it, but getting started is terrible (one needs to know what subject, object, articles and verb conjugation are just to say the simplest of things.) * Catalan is like Spanish, but much less widespread: perhaps a java-like language now nearly defunct because of lack of libraries and a powerful company/state behind it -take your pick.
- rincewind 18y ago
  This is a bit silly. By your logic, could any spoken language be like perl? Japanese would be INTERCAL, because of you have to express a certain amount of politeness toward the comipler.
- asdflkj 18y ago
  The formal features of natural languages (and their power) are irrelevant, because using language in idiosyncratic ways is almost always bad. If everyone else wrote Java-style code in Common Lisp, you could still write Lisp in Common Lisp. Not so with natural languages--if you care about being understood. It would be more useful to speak of literary/conversational cultures associated with different languages, and those can differ quite a lot. For example, many English-speakers accuse Dostoyevskiy of being unrealistic because his characters routinely give long, elaborate monologues to each other. But this is how Russians actually talk. P.S.: Which isn't to say that natural languages are "mere conventions", as PG once wrote. In practice, natural languages vary a lot in their power to communicate different kinds of thoughts. But this is not due to any easily identifiable features, e.g. in syntax. Going back to the programming language metaphor: different cultures write different libraries for their language. And only a culture as a whole can write the libraries, which makes them even more important to the individual than libraries in a programming language.
  - deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
mynameishere 18y ago
English has no dedicated future tense. http://www2.gsu.edu/~eslhpb/grammar/lecture_4/table3-1.htm http://www2.gsu.edu/~eslhpb/grammar/lecture_4/table3-1.htm

9 points by breily 18y ago

Incomplete article, yet starts an interesting discussion topic: are spoken languages also distributed along a power continuum, in a similar way to programming languages? From personal experience: yes. I speak Spanish, Catalan, English and Russian. In my opinion: * English would be php: it's dead easy to mash together just about anything, and grammar and vocabulary are as inventive as you make them. Plus everybody understands it to some extent. * Russian is Lisp: amazingly powerful, but hard to get right and to think in it (at least for a non-native like me -of course I'm biased.) * Spanish is like java: everybody understands a bit of it, but getting started is terrible (one needs to know what subject, object, articles and verb conjugation are just to say the simplest of things.) * Catalan is like Spanish, but much less widespread: perhaps a java-like language now nearly defunct because of lack of libraries and a powerful company/state behind it -take your pick.

rincewind 18y ago
This is a bit silly. By your logic, could any spoken language be like perl? Japanese would be INTERCAL, because of you have to express a certain amount of politeness toward the comipler.
asdflkj 18y ago
The formal features of natural languages (and their power) are irrelevant, because using language in idiosyncratic ways is almost always bad. If everyone else wrote Java-style code in Common Lisp, you could still write Lisp in Common Lisp. Not so with natural languages--if you care about being understood. It would be more useful to speak of literary/conversational cultures associated with different languages, and those can differ quite a lot. For example, many English-speakers accuse Dostoyevskiy of being unrealistic because his characters routinely give long, elaborate monologues to each other. But this is how Russians actually talk. P.S.: Which isn't to say that natural languages are "mere conventions", as PG once wrote. In practice, natural languages vary a lot in their power to communicate different kinds of thoughts. But this is not due to any easily identifiable features, e.g. in syntax. Going back to the programming language metaphor: different cultures write different libraries for their language. And only a culture as a whole can write the libraries, which makes them even more important to the individual than libraries in a programming language.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]

mynameishere 18y ago

English has no dedicated future tense. http://www2.gsu.edu/~eslhpb/grammar/lecture_4/table3-1.htm http://www2.gsu.edu/~eslhpb/grammar/lecture_4/table3-1.htm