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It's probably relevant that early/dominant character encoding schemes were largely created by English speakers. Of course English is easier to represent. I'd b

It's probably relevant that early/dominant character encoding schemes were largely created by English speakers. Of course English is easier to represent. I'd be interested to see what advantages other languages pose. I wouldn't be surprised if there are foreign natural languages that are much easier to parse for meaning programmatically than English (i.e. languages where conjugation and word endings provide explicit information that must otherwise be inferred from context/knowledge of the world that it's much harder for a computer to acquire.)

humanrebar 12y ago
Those are fair points. The above article seems to be claiming some objective things make English easier to represent, like the number of characters that can be represented by one byte and the way characters are combined into words (English is character sequences all the way down). Now, as far as causality, it's also interesting that certain standardizations and simplifications happened in the English language over the past several centuries since the printing press was invented, so it might not be as much of a happy coincidence as it appears to be at first blush. It's also worth pointing out that mechanized language preceeded computerized language by thousands of years, and Europeans weren't the first to the printed language game. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing_in_East_Asia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing_in_East_Asi... ...but the print revolution is generally attributed to Gutenberg, who certainly came much later. Why didn't the revolution happen in Asia? Why didn't Asian languages adapt to this new technology faster? Are the reasons for history all technical (Asian languages have technical debt from previous decisions) or can some aspect of Western culture be responsible as well, at least partially?
- superuser2 12y ago
  We already see Chinese being simplified to make it feasible to type on a keyboard/mobile phone. Interesting times. I wonder if that's the same thing that happened with English and the press, just much later in history (probably related to China not industrializing until later in history.)

humanrebar 12y ago

Those are fair points. The above article seems to be claiming some objective things make English easier to represent, like the number of characters that can be represented by one byte and the way characters are combined into words (English is character sequences all the way down). Now, as far as causality, it's also interesting that certain standardizations and simplifications happened in the English language over the past several centuries since the printing press was invented, so it might not be as much of a happy coincidence as it appears to be at first blush. It's also worth pointing out that mechanized language preceeded computerized language by thousands of years, and Europeans weren't the first to the printed language game. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing_in_East_Asia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing_in_East_Asi... ...but the print revolution is generally attributed to Gutenberg, who certainly came much later. Why didn't the revolution happen in Asia? Why didn't Asian languages adapt to this new technology faster? Are the reasons for history all technical (Asian languages have technical debt from previous decisions) or can some aspect of Western culture be responsible as well, at least partially?

superuser2 12y ago
We already see Chinese being simplified to make it feasible to type on a keyboard/mobile phone. Interesting times. I wonder if that's the same thing that happened with English and the press, just much later in history (probably related to China not industrializing until later in history.)