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I’ve often wondered if there is a parallel to the concept of Turing-completeness in linguistics. Once a language possesses certain principle structures, would i

I’ve often wondered if there is a parallel to the concept of Turing-completeness in linguistics. Once a language possesses certain principle structures, would it be capable of expressing all human thought? I understand that linguistic relativity argues that a language’s structure directs the scope of thought, but couldn’t it be argued that these effects are largely cultural? Two Turing-complete programming languages can naturally suggest quite different solutions when presented with the same problem, but they would both ultimately solve the problem—or in the linguistics parallel, both express the same thought. Maybe we’re back to the adage that it’s easy to solve a problem, but much harder to find a novel one to solve. So there could still be a defence of linguistic/programming relativity. That as certain programming languages invite particular problems to be solved, certain spoken languages invite particular thoughts to be expressed.

andrewflnr 15y ago
I'm not a linguist, but here goes: I'm not sure any language can express ALL human thought. I think as you try to fully specify a given thought, verbosity will increase without bound. Everything is connected in a brain. I do think that there is a certain set of ideas that, once a language can express them, it's roughly equivalent to any other language that can express the same ideas. I used to be really interested in figuring out how to specify this set, but I don't think it's too hard to achieve. It's not nearly as interesting a problem as how to express thoughts efficiently. We don't usually need to consider Turing-completeness when designing programming languages, either.
- jackpirate 15y ago
  It's like programming. Sure you can do the same things in C++ and perl, but which would you rather implement a text parser in? Surely a prolog hacker will approach a problem differently than a javascript one? Natural languages, I think are probably just as differentiated, even if it's harder for us to recognize it.
bugsbunnyak 15y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar

andrewflnr 15y ago

I'm not a linguist, but here goes: I'm not sure any language can express ALL human thought. I think as you try to fully specify a given thought, verbosity will increase without bound. Everything is connected in a brain. I do think that there is a certain set of ideas that, once a language can express them, it's roughly equivalent to any other language that can express the same ideas. I used to be really interested in figuring out how to specify this set, but I don't think it's too hard to achieve. It's not nearly as interesting a problem as how to express thoughts efficiently. We don't usually need to consider Turing-completeness when designing programming languages, either.

jackpirate 15y ago
It's like programming. Sure you can do the same things in C++ and perl, but which would you rather implement a text parser in? Surely a prolog hacker will approach a problem differently than a javascript one? Natural languages, I think are probably just as differentiated, even if it's harder for us to recognize it.

bugsbunnyak 15y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar