Which Language Uses the Most Sounds?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> Taa (or !Xoo) is one of the most phonetically complex languages in the world[0]. Here is a video[1] of a !Xoo speaker reading a paragraph of text in English, and then reading the translation of that same text in !Xoo. The number and variety of phonetic clicks is simply amazing.
for more info see: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-common-phonemes-amon...
Esperanto's phonotactics is basically Zamenhof's Slavic dialect (Polish and Belorussian). However, Lojban tries for a more neutral disposition, even to the point of permitting epenthetic vowels in complex consonant clusters (stressing that they need to be distinguishable from the 6 regular vowels--the 5 vowels above plus /ə/).
It should be noted that when languages have restrictive phonemic inventories, the challenge is not so much in producing the other sounds as it is in recognizing them as distinct sounds.
I have to say though that the Thai language can be spoken relatively calmly and soothingly, but when spoken by in anger or in a particular kind of formality, it sounds quite similar to the language used in the movie. Doesn't matter if it's a male or female speaker, to a westerner it sounds like.. well, the crazy martians from Mars Attacks.
This is actually mentioned in the extras bits on the original Mars Attacks DVD from like 1998 or 1999 or so. They did use Thai language as the main inspiration for the language of the martians.
Question for HN: if your first language is tonal, what do non-tonal languages sound like to you? I've frequently heard Finnish described as boring/mumbling, because it's both non-tonal and has a very predictable stress pattern (emphasis always on the first syllable).
I'm really curious to that Swedish sounds like to tonal-language people. It's often described as "sing-songy" by "non-tonal" people from e.g. UK/US.
https://github.com/debugger22/github-audio
I mean, it seems there is somewhere a sweet spot between lack of expressiveness and overcomplication.
Text is a compact and efficient representation, more similar to strings in other languages.
As far as learning libraries: its not mandatory and you can code as well as anywhere else without them, but the "language enhancing libraries" are undeniably useful, and can do some incredibly useful things. Monad transformers let you merge computational contexts, Conduit lets you cleanly define stream transformations, Lens lets you manipulate specific aspects of some state in a context, etc.
Most of the debates either have answers (use Text instead of String, most of the time) or don't matter to most people (MTL vs transformers or monadLib). In my mind, it's no worse than trying to pick a JavaScript framework. If you're interested, give it a shot some day.
Functor (<$>)
Applicative (<*>, <*, *>)
Monad (>>=, =<<, >=>, <=<)
Monoid (<>)
Alternative (<|>)However if Haskell had macros (like Perl 6's or even Lisp's), I'd jump ship from Lisp quite quickly. It's a mature language with the libraries I want.
What are you wanting that's missing from Template Haskell?
Quechua (from the Andean Mountains) only has three vowels (a, i, u). I can't find a reference, but AFAIK the main hypothesis was that a 3-vowel system made it easier to communicate across longer distances (i.e. across a canyon or valley in the Andes).
You cannot really have too much builtin operators, they are basically functions that don't depend on context (i.e. on type of the object). The only side effect is that some of them are not going to be used often and you'll need a quick way to look them up to be able to understand the code in those cases.
However, having too few of them is a problem that leads to contextual dual meaning operators (like '+' in many languages), related cognitive overhead and bugs.