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> languages are nonsensical, illogical, and the sooner you stop trying to make sense of it all,the faster you will advance. In the first day of Koine Greek cla
by quercusa 5y ago
> languages are nonsensical, illogical, and the sooner you stop trying to make sense of it all,the faster you will advance.
In the first day of Koine Greek class, the instructor asked who had programming experience. She made a point of stressing, as she would again, that unlike computer languages, human languages show no signs of design, and not to spend any time looking for it. It was good advice.
- trompetenaccoun 5y agoWell... not that the advice isn't solid, and she's a good teacher for driving this point into the programmer student's minds. But saying no sign is a bit extreme, there is some level of design in any natural language. Icelandic has a committee that decides on new words. Instead of using foreign loan words they largely make up their own new Icelandic words when needed for new concepts. In German the spelling is centrally planned and gets reformed every other year. Which is why German words are mostly spelled as they're pronounced, as opposed to English. Chinese grammar is super simple and logical. I don't know if this is due to design but it wouldn't surprise me if there had been some reforms in the past. Especially since standard Chinese used to be a somewhat artificial literary language. And speaking of writing: All alphabets are designed of course. Korean is a great example for a really clever and logical design. The reading and writing in turn will have had an influence on the way we think and speak, since it formalized and standardized languages.
- meowface 5y ago>In German the spelling is centrally planned and gets reformed every other year. Which is why German words are mostly spelled as they're pronounced, as opposed to English. As a native English speaker, this is definitely a big plus. I've had German friends who've regularly expressed frustration that there's often no real rhyme or reason or pattern to either English spelling or pronunciation; you just have to memorize it. (Though I could largely say the same of German and French noun genders, even if there are some patterns that are somewhat [but not entirely] consistent.) Meanwhile, spelling and pronunciation in German seems to be pretty bijective. If you know how an unfamiliar word is pronounced, you can generally accurately know how it's spelled, and if you how an unfamiliar word is spelled, you can generally accurately know how it's pronounced.
- jtsuken 5y agoEnglish does not have a concept of THE right pronunciation. If you try to change the spelling of a "word", you'd first have to get a number of former British colonies to agree on how to pronounce it. Is it Woed, Worrrd, Woid, Waed? Germany, after losing both world wars only needs to deal with Switzerland and Austria to agree on updated spelling of something.
- soco 5y agoThere's no attempt of synchronization among German speaking countries, as much we'd appreciate it sometimes.
- progre 5y agoThis is a tangent, but I have a feeling that the Icelandic reluctance to use loan words is actually slowly killing the language. I know people that acually prefer speakning english to each other despite beeing native Icelandic speakers. Apperently having a conversation about modern life is just too complicated.
- quercusa 5y agoI may have internalized a version more extreme than her point - the comment was probably limited to the language of study.
- denton-scratch 5y agoOh, really? PHP is a programming language, and it shows every sign of having been designed to the same level of detail as English.