Hacker News Reader

Comment by mring33621 | Hacker News Reader

Some combination of Enochian and LISP, no doubt. No, I didn't read the article.

I read it hoping to make a Lisp/Esperanto joke but alas, they only found one universal aspect of all languages, they did not find a universal language. The universal tendency is to bundle words together:

> You can see this effect by deciding which of these two sentences is easier to understand: “John threw out the old trash sitting in the kitchen,” or “John threw the old trash sitting in the kitchen out.”

If it's John doing the sitting, I would expect an extra comma before sitting, but for me, the first is a bit ambiguous: is the trash doing the sitting, or John?

That may be because keeping 'threw' and 'out' together in that way in Dutch feels wrong, or at least really, really awkward.

"John threw out the old trash sitting in the kitchen" is a bit of an idiomatic sentence in that understanding its intended meaning depends on knowing that throwing out the trash while sitting down doesn't make a lot of physical sense.

Writing somewhat more formally the sentence would be something like "John threw out the old trash that was sitting in the kitchen." (Although "threw out" itself is somewhat informal language. "John disposed of" or something along those lines would probably be used in a more formal context.)

Actually, I think Lisp has a pretty high average DLM compared to natural languages, which partly explains why some people have so much trouble with it. You can, by just dropping in a pair of parens, arbitrarily separate concepts from one another in a Lisp sentence. In fact, one primary complaint when reading Lisp is trying to pair up closing parens with their opening partners. Do if this research shows anything, it's that Lisp could never have developed as a human language naturally.

.. So I guess it really must have been ordained by the gods, after all, then.

Interestingly the human brain blocks any line starting with

    (fhtagn

Reply on news.ycombinator.com