3 ms·

I wonder, in programming we have this concept of Turing completeness to describe the ability of languages to express a common standard of functionality. Is ther

• lupire 4y ago
  Define complete. Turning machines are only complete on a self-referential way, within the limited scope of computation. Human language is far more complex than a Turing Machine language or any other computational language.
• xaedes 4y ago
  They claim "All languages can communicate all ideas and feelings", but I think it is wrong. First of all there are ideas and especially feelings which can not be directly communicated with language at all. Surely you can label them and hope for the best, that the other side can relate to it, but you can not actually transmit the true idea or feeling you have. If language could truly communicate all ideas it should also be able to communicate all tacit knowledge, i.e. the term for the concept of "tacit knowledge" wouldnt be necessary to begin with. You can try to explain, but the explanation is only the map, not the territory. Or to relate it with computing terminology: Language is digital but existence is analog.
  • mcphage 4y ago
    They don’t mean that there’s a single word in every language for every feeling, but that you can use the language to express it—or at least get asymptotically close.
• xigoi 4y ago
  There's the idea of “semantic primes”: https://wikiless.org/wiki/Semantic_primes?lang=en https://wikiless.org/wiki/Semantic_primes?lang=en
  • jkingsbery 4y ago
    This link would be useful to see on first page of HackerNews. The Duolingo article - not as much.