Ask HN: What is the most Pythonic spoken language? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the most Pythonic spoken language?

People here commonly say Python is one of the easiest languages to pick up quickly, and be able to efficiently take an idea in your head to a suitable prototype program.

My question to you: Is there a Python equivalent spoken language? For some time now I have been thinking about the idea that every philosophical problem is inherently a linguistics problem, as two people must use words to define the ideas in their heads, and words are the medium in which ideas propagate. So, is there a spoken language where two people who understand it can efficiently and accurately translate the ideas in their head to each other? Or is spoken language just too complicated for us to understand in fully?

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Haitian Creole ---------------- If French is Java, Haitian Creole is Kotlin.

The language has a very consistent grammar, all the conjugations are predictable

While most of its words are of French origin, Its syntax is a little different: La Table = Tab la. Le téléphone = Telefòn lan. J'ai envi de manger = mwen anvi manje

It's written phonetically. No surprises when it comes to pronunciation.

It's modern. It's one of the youngest languages in the world.

The language emerged from contact between French settlers and enslaved Africans during the Atlantic slave trade in the French colony of Saint-Domingue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Creole

Interesting. Let me poke at it.

>La Table = Tab la

Would the following translations be correct?

"La voiture" ----> "voitur la"

"le cheval" ----> "cheval lan"?

"T'as envie de manger" -----> "twen anvi manje"

"Vous avez envie de manger" ---> "vwen?wen anvi manje"

Very close

"La voiture" ----> "vwati / machin lan"

"Le cheval" ----> "cheval la"

"Le soulier est rouje" ---> "Soulye a wouj"

Present

"J'ai envie de manger" ---> "Mwen anvi manje"

"Tu as envie de marcher" ---> "Ou anvi mache"

"Il /Elle a envie de parler" ---> "Li anvi pale"

"Nous avons envie de courir " ---> "Nou anvi kouri"

"Vous avez envie de voyager" ---> "Nou anvi voyaje"

"Ils/Elles ont envie de danser" ---> "Yo anvi danse"

Past

"ma voiture était tombée en panne" ---> "Machin mwen an te tonbe an pàn"

"sa voiture était tombée en panne" ---> "Machin li an te tonbe an pàn"

"Il /Elle a visité le musée" ---> "Li te vizite mize a"

Future

"Je vais courir" ---> "Mwen pral kouri"

"sa voiture vas tomber en panne" ---> "Machin li an pral tonbe an pàn"

"Demain nous mangerons" ---> "Demen nou pral manje"

That's cool. Thank you for taking the time.

If you have words with absolutely precise meaning, you have a branch of math, pure or applied. That happens all of the time. Philosophy is a big, weird fuzzy field because when the ideas get precise enough, they start to get regarded as math or science, and no longer the domain of philosophy. Likewise, sufficiently precise language would simply get reclassified as math, always leaving language "fuzzy" right by fuzzy philosophy.

Probably suffering from the blub paradox, but English seems pretty good for conveying ideas. It has a lot of unfortunate spelling and some weird conjugations, but the basic sentence has a subject, object, and verb, and then, it rather promiscuously imports words, which means we have a word for everything, and if we don't, we'll just take it from any language that does, no problem. This ideal language must have a large, precise vocabulary, like English (though you can argue the "precise" bit). English can really cut through to a point, in my opinion.

> when the ideas get precise enough, they start to get regarded as math or science, and no longer the domain of philosophy

That's quite interesting. Do you have any examples?

When I studied philosophy she had a logic seminar. There is a big field of philosophy where logic (also in the mathematical sense) plays a huge role, and there are works in math that have philosophical implications (Gödel's work for example).

I'd thought math was the part of philosophy dealing with ideas that are precise enough to say things with certainty. (No matter how well-qualified and vanishingly relevant those ideas might be ;-) )

I would say English. No one thinks its a beautiful language, but everyone can speak it, and there's a whole bunch of people that can only speak it.

Coming from a Spanish speaking country, I don't think this is true. Most of the people that speak it well here can because they were taught from school since they were little. I see every adult struggling with it because it's just hard to make any sense out of it. There are waaay too many special cases. It's like a programming language filled with keywords and combination of keywords that you must understand intuitively because there are so many rules and exceptions that you can't just learn it by heart.

There is zero way this is remotely accurate. That more closely describes javascript.

Yes, English was my first option too. It's "easy" but it can become quite subtle and complicated. Most newbies think they have mastered it just because they can say "FizzBuzz" in it. It's widely used although sometimes it makes you scratch your head why it was chosen over other languages for some specific cases.There are lots of tutorials and documentation available to learn it.

I dont know. But I will tell you that my native language (Spanish) is probably C++. Created as a supposed improvement to a venerable ancestor, it started to incorporate stuff from other languages so it became a veritable behemoth that everybody uses at their own particular style. People complain about it and say its days are counted, but yet here it is , as strongest as ever.

What is Portuguese then?

Take all of that and introduce a bunch of irregularities. Ship it across the Atlantic, tack on a number of things borrowed from multiple other languages, and you've got one hell of a mess to deal with :D

Portuguese is C++ with the entirety of Boost dragged in without namespacing. Monolithic, solving everything in every way possible so it takes forever to interpret.

Spanish has all those too + Arabic (at an 8X rate compared to Portuguese).In any case what I wrote about Spanish could have easily be written about any modern language, Romance or otherwise, .

True!

I can't really answer this but suggest perhaps some con lang's. Toki pona is a lang with only 200ish words meant for simple effective communication. And Lojban is a language meant to have unambiguousl grammar. The philosophy of the lang tests this one linguistics theory I cannot recall but it's a name of a man, and for the language to be logically understood. Unfortunately there are syntactic variations to phrases so there's no "pythonic" why to saying something (assuming pythonic means that there's one correct way to do something)

As "feeling precise" goes, lojban is pretty good - it feels more like coding an idea than speaking

John McWhorter is a well-known linguist who talks about things like comparative linguistics. He's said in the past that (colloquial) Indonesian is one of the most streamlined languages around. (But really English is becoming the world's international language.)

One of the topics in McWhorter's research is about how languages become streamlined when they are learned by adults as a second language. English, Mandarin, and Swahili all show evidence of this (for English, it seems related to the Vikings).

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/06/co...

For people interested in human languages (or people who don't yet know they're interested in human languages), you might enjoy the courses he's done for Great Courses (paid but worth it, available on ~Amazon):

(1) The Story of Language: covers the topic of language evolution; how languages change over time, how new words are introduced, how languages mix (due to e.g. invasions), pidgins/creoles

(2) Language Families of the World: a survey of what languages currently exist, features of languages in different families

Possibly an artificial language like Esperanto, although that never really took off.

Wow, I've heard about Esperanto before, never knew what it was. Reading about it on wikipedia, very interesting concept. This is kind of what I was looking for. Thanks!

My grandmother had several Esperanto lessons at school. This was in 1930s.

Ah, then I have one more: I thought Indonesian was an artificial language as well, but apparently, it’s not so clear-cut: https://itotd.com/articles/6787/bahasa-indonesia/

I'm not sure for the answer to this one, but on this subject, Turkish definitely has some interesting attributes.

It's an agglutinative [0] language which basically means instead of being separated morphemes are "concatenated" together. For example (from the wiki page):

> the word evlerinizden, or "from your houses", consists of the morphemes ev-ler-iniz-den, literally translated morpheme-by-morpheme as house-plural-your-from.

It also has a simple subject-object verb structure without a grammatical gender.

I find it quite simple to wrap your head around, in the same way python is the go-to language to learn programming, I think it's pretty easy for beginners :).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutination

preface: i'm no linguist, so ...

i think this heavily depends on your mother-tongue / native-language(s) ...

there are often similarities between languages - for example its easy for an italian speaking person to learn spanish and vice-verca ...

but i think its definitly not easy for a non-european language person to learn lets say english or any other european language.

other example: as a german native speaker there are several similar languages - which sometimes are just more of a "slang", or historically missing sound-shifts ... from the south german/austrian "bavarian german", swiz-german to languages like dutch or the belgian language similar to dutch - flemisch? ...

I agree. The human brain gets formed in certain way before you are 5 (sorry, I don't recall the exact terminology or age). As they say Chinese is easy, in China even small kids speak it. (Chinese readers, please subsitute by another, "difficult" language.) Later it gets more difficult to learn any other language. But of course closely related languages are always easier than some fundamentally different language. I speak 5 languages and my factor is up to 12. It took me months to reach certain proficiency in a language close to my mother tongue, but the same number of years in another language, which is very different. From my fellow students in language classes I have seen it can be the opposite for them depending on their mother tongue.

Cultural impact is big. In some small countries where movies are not dubbed (say Iceland) young people speak English much better than in bigger countries where no such influence exists (France, Italy). Americans are particularly bad in foreign languages. I don't think it has anything to do with languages as such, it's a cultural issue. It's not considered important, because a lot of information and entertainment is available already in English.

That’s tough, it is very hard to compare a spoken language where everything is ambiguous to a programming language, where (almost) everything is unambiguous.

As an example, in my family, there is no general agreement as to how many “holes” a straw has, or a spoon, or a cup, or a donut. If we can’t even precisly define what a hole is, then basically everything we say is ambiguous.

German, grammar is extremely regular, sometimes it sounds strange "baletttanzerin". Polish would be Perl5 - TIMTOWTDI grammar is extremely flexible, that even the experts have trouble understanding perfectly correct sentences. English would be js, seems regular but it is not. But that's just my (eastern) eurocentric perspective.

German grammar has lot of unnecessary things, could have been simpler.

You may be interested in looking at Korean. It was designed by one of their emperors and would honestly take you about two hours to learn. You could then read any Korean printed word.

Mind you, you wouldn’t know what it means but you could read and badly pronounce it.

The rest of the language and pronunciation isn’t super easy for western speakers but reading is literally than a day.

Mandarin, because the grammar is very easy, the number of sounds is small (compare to built-ins), it is standardized and taught everywhere despite there being other dialects, and the rest of the world speaks English (Java)

Logic is a simple but seemingly universal subset of most languages. Everyone seems to be able to agree on things such as true and false and hold meanings of these words in the context of logic that mean the same. Not sure about your title question but consider that maths can be understood the same by many people and recreated by anyone from scratch, perhaps the most pythonic would be logic in spoken english.

The most Pythonic spoken language is English, because Monty Python was British.

My first thought is significant white space. Christopher Walkin English must be the most pythonic :)

Dutch of course. Just ask Guido.

Arabic

Arabic is more like Assembly. It's a very detailed language that provide a lot of words to describe things. A lion for example has 300 different names[1].

It goes in low level details and can be very difficult at times.

https://www.quora.com/How-many-words-for-lion-are-there-in-A...

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