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Good point, since I think that some concepts from linguistics can be carried over to computer languages and vice versa. The central dogma of Chomskyism ( which
by Jun8 16y ago
Good point, since I think that some concepts from linguistics can be carried over to computer languages and vice versa. The central dogma of Chomskyism ( which is ~ linguistics, at least in the US) was (roughly) that all languages are equivalent, hence linguistic relativism was BS. This approach has been shattered recently by quite a few people, I think one of the most well known is Lera Boroditsky (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lera_Boroditsky http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lera_Boroditsky). Luckily, CS people (and the like) never had their minds warped by this paradigm so have always been free to discuss "which language to expand the (programming) mind".
My rant done, let me produce my list:
* Ancient Greek (or Latin) - inflectional: Just sheer coolness of it and the literature you can read in the original is enough. But these languages are the grand daddies of Indo-European (unless you wanna go Hittite or Lithuanian) grammar and will teach you valuable linguistic and conceptual points (i.e. cases, noun declension). Learning this is like learning ALGOL, kind of useless but you'll see where a lot of concepts have originated from.
* Mandarin (i.e. Chinese) - isolating: Two points: Seeing the syntaxlessness of these languages is mind boggling and expanding experience. Many poet/translators have remarked about the "timelessness" of Chinese poetry, because verbs don't have tense markings. And, of course, the writing system is very interesting, too. Like learning Lisp (Scheme), an interesting, expanding experience.
* Turkish - agglutinative: (Disclaimer, I'm a native speaker) A great into to the agglutinative aspect of languages (unless you want to learn an American-Indian language) and an interesting phonetic system, so regular, is used as an example a lot in phonology courses.
* Swahili: The concept of noun classes (a generalization of grammatical gender) is bewildering when you first encounter it, swahili has 16 of them (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swahili_language#Noun_classes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swahili_language#Noun_classes)
And more esoteric ones that would be great to learn: My favorites would be Basque (interesting language isolate) and Georgian.
- lkozma 16y agoNice list and interesting point. I haven't heard of Boroditsky before. To your list I would add Finnish or Hungarian for some hard-core agglutinative features. I don't speak Turkish, so I cannot tell to what extent it behaves similarly in this regard. See for example this list with 2253 forms of the word "shop" in Finnish: :) http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~fkarlsso/genkau2.html http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~fkarlsso/genkau2.html Then to cover some indoeuropean vocabulary, I would add one slavic, one germanic and one neolatin language for good measure, although this is a bit too eu-centric.
- Jun8 16y agoFinnish and Hungarian belong to the Ural family, with a lot of similarities to Turkish and some other languages, so much so that people have put forward a super family, Ural-Altaic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural-Altaic_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural-Altaic_languages) to combine them. This is controversial, though. I bet someone speaking Finnish can pick up Turkish pretty quickly. Google "finnish turkish similarity" and you get many interesting (and some funny) results.
- pfedor 16y agoThe existence of the phenomenon of translation proves that all natural languages have the same expressive power. You can translate a text from any language to any other language without losing its meaning, and the translation won't be 10x the size of the original. Typically there will be a close to 1-1 correspondence between the sentences and paragraphs in the original and the translation. None of which is true for programming languages, since programming languages actually do differ in significant ways.
- IgorPartola 16y agoI disagree. Meaning is lost. Maybe not for some classes of text, but for a lot of it, at least some meaning is completely lost. Also, different languages tend to reference different events, ideas, interpretations of history. Try for example translating "war on terror" into a language whose origin is a country with no problem with terrorism. Your translation may be understood on some level, but whatever compelling argument you make, it will be perceived very differently. The reader will walk away with a completely different conclusion of your thesis.
- jokermatt999 16y agoActually, there are generally words that don't quite translate well. It's generally subtle connotations, so you can get the general meaning of a sentence, but not some of the undertones as easily. Since you won't get a compiler error if you miss some of the subtle differences in a translation and you'd need to be familiar with both languages in question, it's harder to pick up such differences. For some examples of what I mean by concepts that are sometimes difficult to translate, look at most examples on this blog: www.betterthanenglish.com/ The older examples are generally better, and I don't agree with the phrase "untranslatable word", but it should provide some general idea of the kinds of ambiguities that would be lost in translation.
- vorg 16y ago> Since you won't get a compiler error if you miss some of the subtle differences in a translation and you'd need to be familiar with both languages in question, it's harder to pick up such differences. You might get a scowl, or some other non-verbal feedback, during speech.
- tel 16y agoI'll add for Chinese that tonality in pronunciation is rather mind-opening in practice. It doesn't have an obvious symbolic attachment, but it does lead to moments of awe as you realize you're tracking and paying attention to someone's word-by-word tonality in other languages. I'll also add Chinese's rather powerful "de" statement. It can be possessively and descriptively, but you'll often see whole sentences jammed up before a "de" in order to describe a single noun (or wildly recursive uses of "de"). About half the time I'm at a loss to translate sometime I find that I'm just not using "de" enough.
- vorg 16y ago> I'll also add Chinese's rather powerful "de" statement. It can be possessively and descriptively, but you'll often see whole sentences jammed up before a "de" in order to describe a single noun (or wildly recursive uses of "de") You can achieve the same effect in spoken English by speaking the jammed up portion quicker, and it's sometimes written with hyphens: "a (whole-sentence-jammed-up-before-a-de)-before-it noun."
- tel 16y agoHaha, sort of true. I suppose it's a lot like the Blub Paradox. It's not that you can't do that sort of thing in English, it's just more painful.