Spoken Languages, Blub, and Convenience | Hacker News Reader

Spoken Languages, Blub, and Convenience

lethain.com

9 pointsbreily4 comments

English has no dedicated future tense.

http://www2.gsu.edu/~eslhpb/grammar/lecture_4/table3-1.htm

Incomplete article, yet starts an interesting discussion topic: are spoken languages also distributed along a power continuum, in a similar way to programming languages?

From personal experience: yes. I speak Spanish, Catalan, English and Russian. In my opinion:

* English would be php: it's dead easy to mash together just about anything, and grammar and vocabulary are as inventive as you make them. Plus everybody understands it to some extent.

* Russian is Lisp: amazingly powerful, but hard to get right and to think in it (at least for a non-native like me -of course I'm biased.)

* Spanish is like java: everybody understands a bit of it, but getting started is terrible (one needs to know what subject, object, articles and verb conjugation are just to say the simplest of things.)

* Catalan is like Spanish, but much less widespread: perhaps a java-like language now nearly defunct because of lack of libraries and a powerful company/state behind it -take your pick.

The formal features of natural languages (and their power) are irrelevant, because using language in idiosyncratic ways is almost always bad. If everyone else wrote Java-style code in Common Lisp, you could still write Lisp in Common Lisp. Not so with natural languages--if you care about being understood. It would be more useful to speak of literary/conversational cultures associated with different languages, and those can differ quite a lot. For example, many English-speakers accuse Dostoyevskiy of being unrealistic because his characters routinely give long, elaborate monologues to each other. But this is how Russians actually talk.

P.S.: Which isn't to say that natural languages are "mere conventions", as PG once wrote. In practice, natural languages vary a lot in their power to communicate different kinds of thoughts. But this is not due to any easily identifiable features, e.g. in syntax. Going back to the programming language metaphor: different cultures write different libraries for their language. And only a culture as a whole can write the libraries, which makes them even more important to the individual than libraries in a programming language.

This is a bit silly.

By your logic, could any spoken language be like perl?

Japanese would be INTERCAL, because of you have to express a certain amount of politeness toward the comipler.

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