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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

Its truly amazing to me how many places come up with their own version of a language in day to day business. This is one of the extreme version, but I guess when you have to deal with horrible conditions for normal communication you make do.

I worked at place that used to have teletypes between locations and paid per letter. They developed a set of abbreviations that survived well into the e-mail era[1]. Every place at least has a lingo to explain specific concepts and procedures in the business.

This is one reason I am very interested in DSLs, dialects in languages like Red and REBOL, and speech acts in agent literature. It seems like a more natural fit with business to developer communication than API calls.

1) I wrote a perl program to translate at one point in some frustration.

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I find it amazing too. At the moment, I'm totally into shorthand writing, i.e. the sets of symbols secretaries and other writing people had to come up with to be able to write faster with pen and paper back in the day.

It's just something really cool about a completely different "language" that's shared by a few people who'll know exactly why it's used and mostly learned out of necessity.

Hey, I did my MA thesis on Soeech Act Theory!

Do you agree with Searle's classification of speech acts into five different types? Or would you use a different way to classify them?

I find taxonomy useful, but I think Derrida is right that Searle was more preoccupied making SAT (and language in general) into a mathematical formula than the "art" of language. I think the only really crucial elements are: - locutions - illocution (act/force and [or vs] intent) - perlocution (act/force and [or vs] intent)

I find very little use teaching or using the 5 categories of Searle for interpretation of verbal or written speech acts.

I find studying a locution from illocutionary intent or perlocutionary intent more useful than Assertive, Directive, etc.

Hope it made sense and it was a useful answer! I still find it a fascinating field that is under-utilized because people try to make it into a programming language (a la Searle) instead of a way to understand semantics and semantic intent.

Thank you for your insights, this has been useful! (I was actually hoping to ask this to a linguist for some time now, so I was happy when I saw your message!)

You surmised my current situation well, I've been focusing a lot on the 5 categories and little on the locutions. I shall remedy that :)

One thing in your answer that I'm a bit fuzzy on is what you meant by the confusing thing in the brackets (act/force and [or vs] intent)?

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