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> This is really interesting. I wonder if there are some human language with properties that would allow for programming language constructs that we don't reall
by gwd 7y ago
> This is really interesting. I wonder if there are some human language with properties that would allow for programming language constructs that we don't really use today.
Ooh, just thought of something interesting: I lived in Turkey for 4 months, and in Turkish, rather than using location to indicate which words modify each other, you use suffixes. (At least, as much as I could figure out in that time.) Then you can order your words for clarity and emphasis, rather than for meaning.
You could imagine doing the same thing with functions or expressions; rather than being stuck with "infix" operators, which need precedence and parentheses, or "prefix" operators forcing you to use RPN, you could order them the way you want.
So perhaps the following three expressions could all evaluate to the same thing ("a / b" in most C-based languages):
/' a' b"
/' b" a'
b" /' a'
a' /' b"
a' b" /'
The idea would be that `/` is the verb, and `'` is the suffix indicating that its two "arguments" are `'` and `"`.
That sounds like an interesting concept to explore anyway.
- azernik 7y agoThere are a lot of languages like this - this is the much-studied spectrum of analytic vs. synthetic. English is one of the most strongly analytic languages (Chinese being even more extreme) - it determines word relationships and function with word order and helper words. Whereas Standard Arabic, Ancient Latin, and Finnish are very synthetic, changing words to indicate their function and relationship to other words in the sentence. If your language has the concept of "declensions", it's probably on the synthetic end of the spectrum. Interestingly, after observing an increase in analyticity over time in European languages, some linguists have hypothesized that analytic languages are easier for foreign speakers to learn as adults, and that this causes languages with lots of geographic spread and inter-language contact to become more and more analytic. With creole languages being of course the most striking example.
- gwd 7y ago> some linguists have hypothesized that analytic languages are easier for foreign speakers to learn as adults, and that this causes languages with lots of geographic spread and inter-language contact to become more and more analytic. That's an interesting theory, and certainly fits with Mandarin (aka "Common Speech"); but how well does it fit with the prevalence of Greek in the ancient world, Latin during the Middle Ages, and Arabic in the Middle East and North Africa now? Those are all towards the "synthetic" scale, aren't they? Did/have those languages drift/ed to become more "analytic"?
- housecarpenter 7y agoYeah, Latin and Greek became somewhat more analytic during the time periods where a lot of foreign speakers were adopting them as their main languages. (That was during the Roman period, not the Middle Ages, for Latin; Latin in the Middle Ages was a dead language used only by learned people in non-everyday contexts, so its grammar was mostly preserved.) I don't know about Arabic.
- azernik 7y agoStandard Arabic is similar to Latin in Medieval Europe - it is a second language that is used for formal education and communication, but that no one speaks as a native language. All the Arabic languages that people speak as first languages are much more analytic. It's a similar phenomenon to Latin, where the formal written Latin used in Europe preserved things like case endings and flexible word order, while the Vulgates that later became the Romance Languages dropped a lot of that and started relying much more heavily on word order.