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English is the javascript of languages: full of warts and enforcing a status quo that sucks but everyone has to learn it because this is the world we live in.

English is the javascript of languages: full of warts and enforcing a status quo that sucks but everyone has to learn it because this is the world we live in. Esperanto would be like Haskell: beautifully pure and regular but no one uses it except for a passionate community of die-hard zealots. Romance languages would be like scripting languages (Python, Ruby, lua, etc.): once you know one the others get really easy. Greek would be like Lisp: had a lot of influence on current languages, dwindled a bit, but is still around.

rahen 5y ago
Have a look at Interlingua too. It's essentially a modernized, simplified Latin. You can readily understand it in spoken and written forms if you're used to the major western languages (English, French, Spanish, Portugese and Italian), and use it fluently in a few weeks. I wish it was the official EU working language.
kwhitefoot 5y ago
> Esperanto would be like Haskell: beautifully pure and regular It might be, mostly, regular. But it is hardly beautifully pure, it is almost as mongrel as any other European language. And of course now that there are quite a few speakers it is importing words even though native Esperanto style words could easily be created.
dsnr 5y ago
To continue your analogies, German would probably be Rust (german grammar is strict and pretty inflexible but leads to correct linguistic output), and Mandarin would be C++ ( because you have to learn so much syntax before you can do anything). (no offense to anyone)
- zdragnar 5y ago
  I would think Mandarin would be closer to perl, no? The grammar and syntax are quite reasonable (as a native English speaker), but the character set is difficult to memorize and write. Doubly so if you go somewhere that prefers traditional characters over the simplified characters. Word order isn't too flexible or wild, and aside from measure words, there aren't really any modifiers or compounds like romance language gendered words or German's obscenely long nouns.
  - bradknowles 5y ago
    If you want to make an analogy to a language that uses a strange character set, I’d point you at APL.
marcus_holmes 5y ago
continuing the analogy with other languages I've tried to learn: German is like Rust: everything has to conjugate properly. Difficult to compile a sentence, but once compiled it has a very specific meaning. Khmer is like Go: simplicity as a virtue. No tenses, no genders, no conjugation. Just slap the words together. But expressing complex concepts takes a lot of words.
nine_k 5y ago
Esperanto could be OCaml: reasonably straightened and cleaned but still on the "practical" side. For a Haskell equivalent, I'd take Lojban.
ralferoo 5y ago
"Esperanto would be like Haskell: beautifully pure and regular but no one uses it except for a passionate community of die-hard zealots." You say "would be" like that's not already the case! (for both examples)
2143 5y ago
Sanskrit could also be like Haskell. Structured. Very precise rules. Yet nobody speaks it in practice. Also while on the topic, may I point out that there are some things you could say in some languages that are nearly impossible (AFAIK) to say in English. Let me give an example. (Okay how do I — for the benefit of all of you — express something in English that I'm trying to prove is impossible to express in English?). Consider the statement: Joe Biden is the 46th President of the United States. How do I express a question in English that asks this "order-number" of Biden such that the answer is "46"? Something like "Joe Biden is how many-th President of the United States?"? But I can't ask that because there's no such word(s) "how many-th" in English! Yet it's trivial to express this in plenty of languages. I belive German is one language where this can be easily expressed. It's trivial in the Indian languages that I know. In English I would have to ask something like "Biden is the n-th President of US. What is n?", which is totally lame. I hope you understood what I'm trying to convey. If you want to get started about these kinds of things look up "declension" on Wikipedia [1]. I'm not a language expert so I don't really know what I'm talking about (perhaps experts can contribute and correct me), but the tldr is that: * the declension situation of modern English is primitive * German has 4 cases of declension * Latin has 5 cases of declension * Sanskrit & Hindi has 8 cases of declension * Ukrainian declension situation also seems to be fairly advanced In languages with more cases of declension, it's apparently easier to express certain things. I hope this was useful. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension
- burg_philo 5y ago
  "How many presidents have their been, up to and including Joe Biden"?

rahen 5y ago

Have a look at Interlingua too. It's essentially a modernized, simplified Latin. You can readily understand it in spoken and written forms if you're used to the major western languages (English, French, Spanish, Portugese and Italian), and use it fluently in a few weeks. I wish it was the official EU working language.

kwhitefoot 5y ago

> Esperanto would be like Haskell: beautifully pure and regular It might be, mostly, regular. But it is hardly beautifully pure, it is almost as mongrel as any other European language. And of course now that there are quite a few speakers it is importing words even though native Esperanto style words could easily be created.

dsnr 5y ago

To continue your analogies, German would probably be Rust (german grammar is strict and pretty inflexible but leads to correct linguistic output), and Mandarin would be C++ ( because you have to learn so much syntax before you can do anything). (no offense to anyone)

zdragnar 5y ago
I would think Mandarin would be closer to perl, no? The grammar and syntax are quite reasonable (as a native English speaker), but the character set is difficult to memorize and write. Doubly so if you go somewhere that prefers traditional characters over the simplified characters. Word order isn't too flexible or wild, and aside from measure words, there aren't really any modifiers or compounds like romance language gendered words or German's obscenely long nouns.
- bradknowles 5y ago
  If you want to make an analogy to a language that uses a strange character set, I’d point you at APL.

marcus_holmes 5y ago

continuing the analogy with other languages I've tried to learn: German is like Rust: everything has to conjugate properly. Difficult to compile a sentence, but once compiled it has a very specific meaning. Khmer is like Go: simplicity as a virtue. No tenses, no genders, no conjugation. Just slap the words together. But expressing complex concepts takes a lot of words.

nine_k 5y ago

Esperanto could be OCaml: reasonably straightened and cleaned but still on the "practical" side. For a Haskell equivalent, I'd take Lojban.

ralferoo 5y ago

"Esperanto would be like Haskell: beautifully pure and regular but no one uses it except for a passionate community of die-hard zealots." You say "would be" like that's not already the case! (for both examples)

2143 5y ago

Sanskrit could also be like Haskell. Structured. Very precise rules. Yet nobody speaks it in practice. Also while on the topic, may I point out that there are some things you could say in some languages that are nearly impossible (AFAIK) to say in English. Let me give an example. (Okay how do I — for the benefit of all of you — express something in English that I'm trying to prove is impossible to express in English?). Consider the statement: Joe Biden is the 46th President of the United States. How do I express a question in English that asks this "order-number" of Biden such that the answer is "46"? Something like "Joe Biden is how many-th President of the United States?"? But I can't ask that because there's no such word(s) "how many-th" in English! Yet it's trivial to express this in plenty of languages. I belive German is one language where this can be easily expressed. It's trivial in the Indian languages that I know. In English I would have to ask something like "Biden is the n-th President of US. What is n?", which is totally lame. I hope you understood what I'm trying to convey. If you want to get started about these kinds of things look up "declension" on Wikipedia [1]. I'm not a language expert so I don't really know what I'm talking about (perhaps experts can contribute and correct me), but the tldr is that: * the declension situation of modern English is primitive * German has 4 cases of declension * Latin has 5 cases of declension * Sanskrit & Hindi has 8 cases of declension * Ukrainian declension situation also seems to be fairly advanced In languages with more cases of declension, it's apparently easier to express certain things. I hope this was useful. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension

burg_philo 5y ago
"How many presidents have their been, up to and including Joe Biden"?