Slashdot Mirror
Extinction Of Human Languages Affects Programming?
Tanmay Kudyadi writes "An article from NewScientist.com reports that half of all human languages will have disappeared by the end of the century, as smaller societies are assimilated into national and global cultures. This may be great news if one is looking at a common standard for communication, but it dosen't help those designing the next generation of programming languages. For example, there's an extremely strong link between Panini's Grammar and computer science (PDF link), and with every language lost, there is a possibility that we may have missed an opportunity at improving the underlying heuristics."
Well.. that dashes all hope I had for finding a papyrus re-issue of "Babylonian C for Dummies". It's been out of print for millennia.
Trolling is a art,
At the end of the day, the computer understands binary and that's it. In fact, languages are only a means for the human to talk to the computer. After a compile all the way down to the processor, the computer still only cares about two words: ZERO and ONE.
Just because a language goes extinct doesn't mean we lost an opportunity to develop better heuristics. It just means some programmers will lose touch with programing.
Currently, programing languages are based around english because the first programmers were english. If programing goes chinese, the only thing that will change is uni-lingual anglophones not understanding what is going on.
Of course this may change with biotechnology, but our current technology is still electric and i don't think it matters here.
In 200 years, There'll be 637 different words for "bug" in the our universal spoken language, ESPERA~1. To express confusion, a speaker will slap his hands over his face, stand stock still, shout "BLUE!", and wait for the other person to walk away.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
When I went to Europe, everybody under 70 spoke english -- except for a couple of wacky youngers.
Now, we aren't anywhere close to having a world language, but I think that within 100 years English will be the primary language of everybody. (I also think the concept of the Nation-State will be abolished by then -- it's only about 500 years old).
of course...
what else should we ever need to learn to speak? :)
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Extinction of half the world languages won't improve global communication for a long time yet. The first languages to go will be ones that people are now bilingual in. Cultures aren't just going to drop one language and move to another; obviously there has to be a transitional period.
Seriously, this is similar to faking the landing on the moon. Matching natural language to programming will give us obtuse languages that are difficult to understand and have a HUGE learning curve.
Programming is based on a 'higher understanding' of how to design something, and the only real 'major' difference between the languages should be the syntax. But having a language based on a natural language and a 'normal' computer language would be the difference of VB and lisp. You just can't design an app the same way for both languages.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Hmm, that's doubleplus ungood...
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
If we have record of that language, then I don't see how much would have been lost. If there were so few people speaking it then what are the chances it would have had a measureable influence on the design of computer languages anyway? Especially considering that the people doing the designing typically come from a small set of backgrounds (euro, asian, american...)
Will cause us all to be able to think in 1s and 0s. This will leave no need for programming languages as we will be able to speak the computer's native language.
-Certified TechnoWeinie
Human languages dying may be a pity (or not), but it does not have anything to do with computer programming.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
are the ones that do not contain the technical leanguage to survive contact with whatever absorbs them. Look at how English is spreading with words to describe new technology into languages that don't have it.
The time will come when we only have one language left, but not soon.
...strong link between Panini's Grammar and computer science
I knew sandwiches were related to programming!
How exactly is C or Pascal based off a spoken language?
....
while (alive)
while (lust && !state(HUNGER)) {
seek_women(HIGH_PRIORITY);
if (found) {
sex_up(BYPAIRS)
sleep();
} else {
sex_up(MANUALLY);
watch(CARTOONS);
}
}
if (state(HUNGER))
{
seek_food();
if (found) {
chow_down_like_no_tommorow();
} else {
slaughter(NEIGHBOUR);
chow_down_like_is_tommorow();
}
}
}
Oh I get it
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
sign language and I can guarantee that NY'ers will never part with it. Now of course programming with just the middle finger isn't as productive, but it works none the less ..|..
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
This may be great news if one is looking at a common standard for communication
So, we're considering the 3,400 languages that will be left a common standard for communication?
I'm not trying to be a meany; but come on, that's a pretty odd statement to make.
"with every language lost, there is a possibility that we may have missed an opportunity at improving the underlying heuristics."
That sounds plausible to me. However, isn't part of a programming language the ease with which we can use it? If no one could natively use a language or grasp it easily, then comprehending these wonderful heuristics would be extremely difficult. High level programming languages exist for a reason. That's why few people program in assembly--it's difficult to learn. No one grew up speaking assembly, but many people grew up speaking Romance and Teutonic languages. If programming languages were suddenly structured like, for example, Arabic or Chinese, I would likely find it extremely difficult to learn and use them. (Note that I can speak Chinese but can hardly imagine trying to program in it.)
FYI Your PC will be 9 Billion times faster than today.
Help fight continental drift.
On the plus side, there are new languages showing up all the time. Klingon, Vulcan, Romulan, Cardassian ....
Imagine the programming possibilities!!!
Great civilizations have lived and died on false theories. Don't mess up mine with a few facts.
Honestly, I've never seen such stuff in a well reputated journal. Programming languages are something that must be understood by computers - besides humans.
If you want a "natural" language for computers then it would have to be necessarily of Chomsky-0 type. Thus Turing-complete. And therefore not decidable which implies that a computer cannot parse it.
The author fails to realize that human languages are completely different from programming languages. Furthermore his main point is frankly rubbish: it's well known that the grammar for all human languages follows the same basic rules (Chomsky's hypothesis) thus nothing would be lost when old languages die out. Additionally it has been proven that new languages are created all the time.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
and with every language lost, there is a possibility that we may have missed an opportunity at improving the underlying heuristics
.. the heuristic will improve itself in an evolutionary manner over time .. how many of us hold on to those old RLL hard drives in case they "might come in handy someday?" .. it just doesn't wash in the long run. properly documented, these language won't be Lost - they will simply fall by the wayside and be replaced with more globally recognized means of communication. while i certainly can't argue that diversity is beautiful, i wouldn't mind a single language that everyone is likely to be fluent in. the benefits gained when things are no longer so likely to be 'lost in translation' probably outweigh the blind dedication towards keeping old languages alive.
.. i find it kind of gutteral, tho its very expressive .. lets go with japanese .. they have cooler cartoons :D
this is a packrat argument
i'm not saying english should neessarily be the One language
as long as Incubus still exists, we can feel secure in knowing that Esperanto will always be with us. Shatner Rules!
On a different note, Incubus and Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner are two films that are the only ones ever made in their respective languages (Esperanto and Inuit). Does anyone know any more?
Which is ridiculous.
Here's the great truth - the Net has done more in 10 years to advance English as the dominant language than 500 years of foreign occupations did by the British. And, as the article mentions, English and Spanish are incorporating idiomatic elements of other languages as slang and new vocabulary.
The 2nd truth, languages like C and perl and visual basic have constructs based in English (for...foreach...if/then, print, exit, need I go on..) and understanding these key words also helps push English as the dominant language.
One can debate the merits of this, but I disagree with the slashdot premise that it cuts off avenues of finding better heuristics, because any attempt at a dominant language will and must evolve, even if it were the sole language of the entire planet.
We have known that language is an imperfect form of communication. The greeks knew it (hence the god Rumor.) The Taoists knew it. In 6000 yeras of recorded history we have not found a perfect language. If it doesn't work for huminty, why would computers be any different, where context is implied in almost every respect?
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
I get the feeling that Klingon will end up being better preserved than at least half the languages that could potentially disappear.
As long as PASCAL, COBOL, and C++ are extinct too, I don't care.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
The new languages like l33+ and aol-speec?
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
This article is just confusion. Somehow the loss of obscure human languages effects programming? In what way? Neither article links makes any mention of such a thing.
In fact, the very fact that a universal human semantic language seems to exist implies that the loss of specific languages doesn't make any difference.
Also, human languages and programming languages are very different. Programming languages that actually work are designed with BNF syntax, a very structured formal style that can't begin to describe human language; human language is organic and has no destinct syntax (its statistical only).
Thus, the thesis of the article 1) isnt supported in the links and 2) doesnt make sense.
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This is sort of misleading. A better way to say it might be that half of all languages we know exist in the current day may be extinct in 100 years. All the languages that we know today probably constitute a tiny fraction of all human languages, since languages continuously are created, evolve, merge, die out, etc.
By that time I suspect we will be farther along generational paths for expressing logic, concepts, and data for machines to process. I know that language has an effect on thought patterns and influences logic and learning but I suspect that will be mitigated by better input mechanisms.
There are way too many budding technologies and research paths right now to think that we will still be at such a low level of abstraction with computer instructions in 100 years. Didnt they just get a rat to move a mouse cursor with direct nervous system connections and arent there a bunch of biological processing projects going on? how bout quantom or analog computing?
Dunno, seeme like less of a tragic loss for computing and perhaps more of a loss for human space concerns.
I can easily see how subtilties in the "rules" underlying various spoken langauges can provide insights that could help to improve programming languages. Problem is that I don't thing very many people are expert enough in the linguistics of rare and dying languages AND computer science to find and make use of these possible connections.
we'll get fragmentation between instruction sets... babelfish will translate between proper Nihon86 and broken PowerPCgrish.
--
The idea that obscure languages "becoming extinct" will adversely affect computer science is wrong on multiple levels.
First, any language properly so-called has referents in reality. Those referents are language independent; that is a fundamental aspect of epistemology. If that were not so, it would be impossible to translate between human languages. Obviously, it is very possible.
Second, the characteristics of human language which affect computer languages are - what? A computer "language" is a formal syntax to tell an electronic machine exactly what to do, in a particular order. That's it. A lot of Slashdot readers know multiple computer languages (and no doubt, human languages). Aside from speed considerations, any complete computer language can do anything any other language can do, as long as the ability to access given hardware is the same.
Third, what difference does it make if a language is "extinct" or not? Latin is a "dead" language but it forms the root of many European languages. If anything, computer "languages" can, and do, evolve far more rapidly than any human language, to fit evolving needs and better comprehension of good programming practices. Whether an addition operation is called "Addition", "Summa", "Plus", or "+" is irrelevant really, other than conciseness of syntax (leading to "+" as ideal here.)
In Alaska, the Eskimos have 15 different words for snow, allowing for them to describe snow to new dimensions beyond that of some other languages. It's easier to see solutions for something you have a word for, then for something you have no frame of reference for. We "think" differently when we speak other languages simply because of the difference in the language. Think on that...
Some things to ponder ...
Linguistic family trees generally mirror genetic family trees. The links between the two assist both linguists and geneticists in determing where we come from and how we got there.
Every time we lose a language, we lose something unique or even magical. Yiddish has more words for simpleton than the Inuit use for "snow".
The native languages spoken by the Lapps, Basques and Welsh are relics from before Pro-Indo European language and culture spread from India to Europe, displacing most native languages and cultures.
Tiny New Guinea contains 1/5 of all the languages spoken on Earth.
If we lose these languages, we lose a piece of ourselves. Just to keep things in perspective.
All this is is a group of researchers trying to look important and get more research money.
Me extinct English? That's unpossible.
they evolve or merge with more influential ones.
t ml)
that's basic linguistics for you.
I remember in one of my linguistics courses, I read about one scholar who, after describing how the Norman invasion of England added over 10,000 new words to the English language, stated English should be classified as a dialect of French.
Usually, words in one language which describe something that does not have a concept in the assimilating language stay unchanged. "Sushi" is one example.
A funny example of a word evolving between languages is "budget":
Middle English bouget, wallet, from Old French bougette, diminutive of bouge, leather bag, from Latin bulga, of Celtic origin.
(http://www.bartleby.com/61/9/B0530900.h
Tower of Babel, here we come!
"The Tower of Babel
1 Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. 2 As men moved eastward, [1] they found a plain in Shinar [2] and settled there.
3 They said to each other, "Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly." They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth."
5 But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. 6 The LORD said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other."
8 So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel [3] -because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth. "
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
And I don't think the food situation is all that bad anywhere in the world at this time, so there might very well be more of us wasting our lives here than there are people starving. Kinda sad...
The fact I am posting here myself is crushing me with irony...
Having a wide diversity of natural languages to study impacts future computer science in many ways beyond simply providing a stock of examples to copy.
For one thing, the study of natural languages will teach us about cognition in general and it is those results which are likely to filter into programming rather than direct borrowing from a language's syntax or structure.
For another, think of Larry Wall developing Perl out of his understanding of English (and whatever other natural languages he's been exposed to). Suppose fifty years from now a young Swahili-speaking student develops a new programming language - what insights might she have gained from being brought up speaking Swahili? (and etc. for every other language that manages to survive another 50 years).
Now I don't believe that languages totally determine the way we think. It's possible to think *anything* in *any* language, but some things are easier or less ambiguous in one language or another. In English "He dropped to the ground" - does that mean he jumped, fell by accident, or was pushed? Some languages don't let you get away with that kind of ambiguity of causation (though they have ambiguity of different sorts). So differential ambiguity and ease of expression - those aren't such bad things to look forward to in programming languages of the future.
And, lastly, as the article referenced on Panini's Sanskrit grammar illustrates, native grammarians may develop rule-based grammers of their own languages and what we can learn from them is the structure of those rules in addition to the structure of the language itself.
FUD
I can't wait until all the languages with that that acronym become extinct.
That assumes that linguists don't know what's 'wrong' each each natural language that could be 'fixed,' which is hardly the case. There are _numerous_ artificial languages in existence, almost all of them unsuccessful. Only Esperanto and Interlingua have much of a following. (No, I don't count Klingon as successful :)
The problem isn't in creating an easy to use, expressive language. The problem is in getting people to learn and use it. While it may be tragic from a cultural history perspective to lose a language, it won't have any effect on linguistic development.
This holds true for languages whether spoken, written, or computed.
IMO, anyway.
In thinly-disguised satire of Soviet Russia, Language makes YOU extinct!
if C was good enough for Linus, is good enough for everything else!!
Who needs words to program anyway!
.25*+/4 3 5 6
4.5
It's called Assembly. Assembly is what lowly humans use because their meat-brains can't keep track of all those 0's an 1's.
Hey baby, wanna Kill All Humans?
</pensive>
I can't remember the name of the organization I read about but recall reading about some organization that was trying to archive many texts, etc., regarding diminishing languages. Anyway, I could see why one would want to preserve that, but as for programming languages, maybe for kicks and giggles... Too many programming languages were created with little documentation, and actual follow through. Ever take a look at some of the things on SourceForge or Freshmeat? Sure they don't post programming languages per-se but the same follows suit with the languages...
ACE, ADA, APL, Assembly/ASM, BASIC, BETA, C# / C Sharp, CECIL, CGI, CID, CILK, COBOL, , DELPHI, DYLAN, EIFFEL, FORTH, FORTRAN, FutureBasic, Haskell, ICON, IDL, J, Java, LISP, LOGO, ML, Modula, MPI, M[UMPS], Oberon, Pascal, POP, PowerBuilder, Prolog, PVM, QBASIC, REBOL, REXX, SAS, Sather, Scheme, ScriptX, SDL, SELF, Smalltalk, SQL, SR, TCLTK, TeX, Theta, Verilog, VHDL, VI Editor, VisualBasic, XML
MoFscker
YEAGH!
j ht ml?id=1484765&_requestid=525317
http://phenomi.net/deanscream/index.html
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4021146/
http://www.mtv.com/chooseorlose/headlines/news.
Hmmm... Well we could take those that won't learn English and feed them to the starving folks who will.
Trolling is a art,
He devoloped a programming language called "plankalkul", which included stuff like arrays, subroutines and floating point arithmetic.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
cobol would become extinct.
12. Specifications are for the weak and timid!
11. This machine is a piece of GAGH! I need dual Pentium processors if I am to do battle with this code!
10. You cannot really appreciate Dilbert unless you've read it in the original Klingon.
9. Indentation?! -- I will show you how to indent when I indent your skull!
8. What is this talk of 'release'? Klingons do not make software 'releases.' Our software 'escapes' leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in its wake.
7. Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Our software does not coddle the weak.
6. I have challenged the entire quality assurance team to a bat'leth contest. They will not concern us again.
5. A TRUE Klingon Warrior does not comment his code!
4. By filing this CFS you have challenged the honour of my family. Prepare to die!
3. You question the worthiness of my code? I should kill you where you stand!
2. Our users will know fear and cower before our software. Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
1. My function calls do not have 'parameters' -- they have 'arguments' -- and they ALWAYS WIN THEM.
Damn those Indians. First our jobs, then our
grammar. Oh wait, Panini was an Indian linguist
who lived a thousand years ago. Curse those wacky
Indians (Aryans) for being the Indo in
Indo-European, and for inventing and calling
swastika (a hindi word) as the holiest symbol
in their land for millenia (to this day). And
for speaking Sanskrit/Hindi - a European language !
tomstdenis attempted humor and he FAILED IT!!! (and how!) He deserves to be castigated for that. Makes it all the more sweet if he ever succeeds.
People who speak different languages, *think differently*.
Tables and chairs have gender? WTF? Yes they do in other languages. Reverse Polish Notation, is that backwards or what? But you get the picture, people from different cultures and especially languages think differently, different algorithms and structures come more naturally.
It isn't just programming languages which will lose out when English takes over the world, it's much more fundamental than that, some thoughts, concepts will be easier, some will be harder, maybe even impossible to formulate simply because of the language.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
The languages that are lost are the ones that do not contain the technical leanguage to survive contact with whatever absorbs them.
Are you kidding?? I'm not sure how literally and how completely you mean this, but I very much doubt that technology is such a prime factor as you imply.
I'm not a linguist, but I'd be pretty sure that the death of each and every language in history would make for its own PhD thesis. There would be too many factors and too many interactions to boil it down to such a simple formula. Besides technology, there's culture, economics, religion, and probably a slew of other factors that neither of us could imagine.
I could be wrong, but I'd be amazed if so...
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
But it's a political (in the broad sense) question in the end - what aspects of human existence matter, and how are resources to be allocated between them?
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
Personelly I em steell expecteeng Leteen to-a meke-a e-a huge-a comebeck... bork!bork!bork! Yes, vell I zeenk Bork ees ze-a lenguege-a of ze-a future-a, how cen you-a deny zees posseebleety. It only stends to-a reeson. bork!bork!bork!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Now what you need to do is work on the first set where dean was winning, work in the 'i have a scream' speech, and you'll have yourself an epic.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
A couple of hundred years ago, Scotland, Ireland, Wales all had different languages. The primary language in all three countries is now English.
Now we have TV and the Internet, communication is much much faster. I don't believe it'll take another 200 years to become the primary language everywhere.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I find it hard to worry about extinction of languages.
Extinction is a natural part of life, and the only things that become extinct are things that, for one reason or another, cannot manage to survive.
In the case of languages, the causes of extinction would be lack of utility, lack of speakers or something else.
Why would anyone want to incorporate what might be unsuccessful features in a computer language?
Implying that there would be a loss to Computer Science from a loss of a language seems like quite a stretch. At worst, it would seem that the loss would be positive for Computer Science, in the sense of, "Look what would happen to your language if you had concepts of time like this dead language!"
Also, an extinct language should not be confused with a dead language. Latin, for example, still has tremendous utility and value in the world, partly because it is dead and unchanging. It is the base for many living languages, and is a universal language for a universal church.
HCG 50a = 2MASX J11170638+5455016
11h17m06.4s +54d55m02s
It's official. I feel like the biggest dork on this comment thread. I am a computer geek and i've taken Sanskrit and actually read Panini. Please guys, promise me we won't talk about women next!
The most important thing we will need to know as humans is how to plea: "Please don't kill me oh masterful one" in c#, java and perl.
Hey if someone can pay me to sit in front of my computer and chant (or type in_ sutras I'm all for it. I even have prior experience, except those were Japanese sutras. Oh well, everything's being outsourced to the Subcontinent these days.
I think we have much bigger things to worry about than programming languages if human languages begin going extinct, like the concomitant disappearance of ethnic diversity.
Just a thought.
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
Oh.....and there are just as many different spellings of the word too.
Well, that's only true if you are spelling Japanese using the English alphabet. But then, you're imposing a completely foreign system of writing on the language, so what do you expect?
If you mean spelling using Japanese letters, then (as long as we exclude the whole kanji issue), Japanese spelling is absolutely dead simple. Of course, drop kanji into the mix, and you get possibly the most complex writing system in the world...
On the topic of spelling, English speakers have no right to feel superior. English spelling is possibly the craziest system that could be imposed on such a small set of letters (although - maybe it's because it's such a small set of letters). Take the sentence:
"Though the cough was rough, I shall plough through."
(And for Americans, "plough" = "plow".) Notice that all the words end with "ough" but none of the pronunciations are the same! That's just crazy.
(And if you try and argue that "plow" is more regular, I'd have to ask why it doesn't rhyme with "blow" or "flow"?)
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
How does a German and a French person talk? They speak English. How does a Hindi and Urdu speaker talk? They speak English.
As the world begins talking to one another, it turns out there's only one language they all speak. English, and like TCP/IP, it'll replace all of the other protocols.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
/Unfunny, obscure attempt at Canadian political humour
I've been wondering about this one for a while now.
Why is it that on earth we have thousands of different languages, but no alien race ever has more than one?
And why do all alien languages rely on we'ird apos'tr'ophes and the letters k, x, and z?
There must be a conspiracy theory in here somewhere...
We are trying to improve the heuristics of our programming languange. How would you write it in your culture?
pictographs emerge...
fish, lion, lion, star, moon, star, comet, lion.
Hmmm... Interesting... But I don't see the significance of the moon in this function!
Couldn't you have written it using 2 comets omitting the moon entirely? Would that not have been more elegant?
I don't know about anyone else but I know it's clearer to me.
Somehow, we need to discover a way not only to document these languages but to keep them alive. Perhaps we can find a parallel in those who learn Tolkien's languages for the sheer joy of it. Somewhere in our large world, there has to be a handful of people who want to speak Middle Chulym.
--Mike Perry, Inkling Books, Seattle
Author: Untangling Tolkien: A Chronology and Commentary for The Lord of the Rings
Every single human being speaks a unique language.
Think about it: how many words do you know, which ones, and how do you use them?
Your language is 100% unique, like your DNA.
What we call "languages" are median samplings, protocols that people approximate to.
So, 6bn people, 6bn languages. Some samplings may change but English as a 'language' has more variety than hundreds of the extinct languages put together.
As human population increases, so do the total number of languages.
So, the article is entirely junk, its basic premise is not even correct.
we should start getting to work on that tower to heaven.
I announce this project as soon as there's a language-related news on Slashdot...
BabelCode Project investigates a new methodology of controlled translation and makes it available for practical use. By-products such as foreign language writing assistants and learning tools are also useful applications based on BabelCode databases.
http://www.babelcode.org
Language usage patterns can be effectively stored as various BabelCode elements, therefore any natural language can be saved this way.
The article fails to mention that language death and birth is a natural phenomena. For isolated populations without written language rules to carry the language through the generations, you probably see a new language born every other generation. Kids never learn their parent's language exactly. The life cycle of a natural language is probably only three or four generations before it becomes unrecognizable.
The author of the article is simply lamenting that the underlings in the world aren't on a petri dish for study.
Quite frankly, I see a world where people are free to chose the language that best suits their personal goals as the most interesting world to study and live in.
The article fails to make mention of any new language formed in the next generations...nor does it acknowledge that such new languages formed in an industrial era are likely to include cognitive structures that languages to date lack.
BTW, if French was becoming the world language, the academic community would probably be applauding the disappearance of lesser languages.
I found the paper interesting if complex, but one thing that struck me is that there is a general trend in indo-european languages (at least) for the languages to simplify drastically over time.
Sanskrit itself might have been an extremely regular language and one that had rules that could have been applied to a computer language, but almost all descendant languages have simplified enormously:
Sanskrit had 8 gramatical cases, and modern Hindi, Urdu and Gudjarati, have fewer.
Sanksrit had 3 grammatical genders, and Hindi et al have fewer.
Given that this grammatical simplification applies almost uniformly to indo-european languages, one wonders how the original Sanskrit and indo-european were originally developed in the first place.
from the article Due to its algebraic nature and its comprehensiveness, the
structure has been described as a machine generating words and sentences
of Sanskrit.
I guess that the only solution is for a brave program to go into the temple for three days and let the machines have a tower of bable experience.
You should realize that some branches of linguistics have notions about how language and the brain are related that are not exactly shared by many cognitive scientists. So, when Harrison says something like, "each language lost leaves a gap in our understanding of the variable cognitive structures of which the human brain is capable. Studies of different languages have already revealed vastly different ways of representing and interpreting the world", take it with a grain of salt. Language loss is regrettable for many reasons, but cognitive science would probably continue to do just fine even if we only had a dozen different languages around the globe.
Any questions?
To be blunt: No they don't.
Language does influence thought, simply because people will try to understand something in a way that makes sense from the perspective of their language... But the language won't fundamentally limit their thoughts. I'm sure you can think of times when you had an idea or an emotion that you lacked words for; if the claim in your post was true, you would not be capable of such thoughts.
Do you really, truly believe that somebody can be colorblind just because they don't have color words more specific than "dark" and "light?"
Language makes for a convenient labeling system, but it doesn't define your thoughts. Now somebody mod up the siblings to this post so that their useful content can be read as conveniently as the parent.....
Tables and chairs may be assigned grammatical bins, and these bins can be the same as those assigned to human genders (cf: "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things", George Lakoff), but it does not mean that French people actually think that a table has anything conceptually in common with a woman, besides the pronoun used to replace it/her. (Or a man, I can't remember my French.)
There is something important lost when the speakers of a language die, yes. But what is lost is not any concept, pattern of thought, or way of looking at the world. Because there is no concept that you cannot translate across the language barrier. There is a word in Russian, I've heard, for that feeling you get when your ex walks into the room. But just because there is no word for it in English doesn't mean that I couldn't just explain it to you. Just because some Native American languages do not have the same adverbs for time that English does doesn't mean that speakers of those languages have no concept of time.
That line of logic was presented by a linguist named Benjamin Whorf in the first half of the 20th century, and has been discredited by all modern serious linguists.
There is a "mentalese" that precedes and is fundamental to language. Babies have it. Animals have it to varying degrees. It's, yknow, nice for English speakers to presume that the exotic qualities of other languages means that their speakers have equally exotic mental structures. But they think, by and large, exactly the same as "us".
Intelligent Design: because MATH is HARD.
Brian Connors has written a programming language based on the Klingon language.
The var'aq page.
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
It depends on what school of linguistics you subscribe to. In the US, Chomsky's generative grammar reigns nearly universally (MIT, etc.). In Europe, functional linguistics is widespread (Reading, Liverpool, Freiburg, Cologne, etc. but also Stanford, U AZ, etc.).
To us functional linguists, it is apparent that language does not determine thought, but also that language is determined by culture. In other words, use is what determines what language looks like (see Krug's work with string frequency, Lehmann and Traugott's grammaticalization, etc.).
Of course, it seems once again to boil down to the ancient question -- what came first, the chicken or the egg.
Once language appeared on the scene, it changed with usage. However, it is quite robust, as evidenced by the very slow linguistic changes compared with rapidly advancing culture.
The death of small languages is natural and positive consequence of technology breaking down the barriers between people. The internet, satellite TV, their like are logical followups to radio, roads, airplanes, ships, mail, newspapers, and, ultimately, just walking away from your tribe's village to see what's over the next hill.
Some folks will see this as evil globalization raising its head once more. But, they're wrong, as they usually are. Their logic leads to the past, and to the artificial freezing of someone else's culture in a state of suspended growth. That's OK for museum exhibits, but not for real people.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Yeah, Lemmy: yeah.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
lol
Conlangs (constructed languages) and Artlangs (artificial/artistic languages) are alive and well. I personally would rather study an interesting grammar like the predicate logic in Lojban than to take five times as long memorizing different tenses, spelling exceptions, and the sex of inanimate objects. In addition to Lojban/Loglan and Klingon which others have mentioned, there is of course Tolkien's languages of Middle Earth, Esperanto, Interlingua, Volupuk, and a few dozen others. Some die, of course, but even more are created.
Every time I try to comprehend the parent post, I get:
ungood is not an lvalue
Some people are just so hard to understand!
It's one thing to see languages die in countries where ceratin languages are forbidden, but in free nations where anyone can speak any language they want, it is irresponsible for an ethnic group to let the language and any other customs die. Watch "Whale Rider" for a modern tale of the New Zealand Maori trying to preserve their heritage. When a people lets their native customs die in favor of another set of customs, those customs really died a longer time ago than they suspect. Only resuming a strong identity is going to salvage the culture.
It all comes down to taking the time for the things that really matter in life. If a people cherish the Internet and pagers and other modern things more than the things of old then they have made a choice (concious or unconcious) to let the old ways slip into the eternal night. That is why I like to see locale options available for open source projects; the more that these are encouraged, the more lanaguages that can be saved. Countries like China that are taking an aggressive stance against Microsoft and Western commercial software are not just trying to keep from paying licenses, but also saving their culture from becoming english-saturated. If they also push locale options, then there will be plenty of rugged alternatives soon. Without alternate language construction examples, computing languages will likewise mainstream into similar styles.
Don't get me started about immigrants dumping their own native names for "Tony", "George" and the like when they come into the U.S. A name like "Panseur" (made it up) is just as valid a name.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
But the language won't fundamentally limit their thoughts. I'm sure you can think of times when you had an idea or an emotion that you lacked words for; if the claim in your post was true, you would not be capable of such thoughts.
Methinks the language can be and is limiting.
If you lack the words and grammar, you can have the thought but it is extremely difficult to do much more than that with it. Analysis or expression of the thought is difficult to impossible.
Language makes for a convenient labeling system, but it doesn't define your thoughts.
How do you think, except in terms of those convenient labels?
Do you really, truly believe that somebody can be colorblind just because they don't have color words more specific than "dark" and "light?"
Does a B&W photograph or television look realistic? With no words for color, no means of expressing any difference in color, the perceived differences in color just become part of the background noise.
Given a reasonable degree of flexibility in the language, it's hard to find definitive cases where the language is limiting simply because there are too many ways to route around the damage.
Do you really, truly believe that somebody can be colorblind just because they don't have color words more specific than "dark" and "light?"
I think this analogy is flawed.. I may be able to see a whole world full of colour, but without words to describe it, how do I share those thoughts?
If it still isn't clear, try describing a scene, vibrant in colour, with only 'light' and 'dark'. That green tree over there? Ok, sure, it's.. well, maybe a little 'darker' than the light blue horizon. Take the colour out, and you get "that tree is lighter than that horizon". Picture it without the colours, and you're expressing yourself 'colourblind'.
(Sure, another person listening could see what you mean by context and by looking at the tree and the horizon, but go to a more abstract topic, and what happens? Language does limit you.)
Computer languages must be understood by humans, then compiled to a language understood by a machine.
Mandarin follows the same rules as English?
what, funny symbol befor other funny symbol, except after third funny symbol?
No disrespect meant, Mandarin, and many other asian languages, have a rich history and are very interesting in there own right. I just fal to see how Mandarin and English follow the same rules.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This is like claiming that the reason we should save the environment or the rain forest is that we might find a medicine in them. That's such a silly reason that it's almost a bad idea to bring it up in a debate; using a trivial reason can actually make your case look weaker, even if logically speaking it does technically make it stronger.
If that's the only reason you have to be worried about languages dying... then you have nothing to worry about.
Call me politically incorrect, but what do we really lose when we lose an obscure language? First, languages aren't like living creatures; if they evolve, they are Lamackian in their evolution and Lamarkian evolution don't really have gene pool diversity issues that Darwinian evolution has taught us about. Interesting or valuable ideas can be imported into other languages at any time, so the diversity arguments IMHO don't really play out.
Secondly, if we are really concerned about the idea or the viewpoints it represents, those truly reside in the human users, not the language. As the humans migrate, they will bring their ideas and viewpoints into their new languages; again, because languages are not static like an organism's genetic code is. If the ideas or viewpoints don't survive the migration, there's probably a good reason for it. (Again, it may be Lamarkian, but it is still evolution; useless things eventually come out of the pool.)
Consider this a contrary viewpoint; I don't necessarily think language death is a completely good thing, but instincts honed by environmentalism and Darwinian evolution do not serve you well when thinking about languages, which are neither environmental (in the Gaia sense) nor Darwinian. You need a better reason for thinking language death is bad then "It's bad, m'kay?" One may very well exist, but I can't think of it.
It wouldn't have been any use because it wasn't Y0K compliant.
We may lose Maori dialects, but as long as software dev is outsourced to India, Panini's tradition will live on!
I can forsee the future in the year 2100:
The world of 50 billion people will all be speaking English. All code will be poorly written in C, and all computing devices will run Microsoft Windows.
The 10 Commandments will read:
1. There is only one god and Bill Gates by thy name.
2. Thou shall not execute any daemons, or any other process decending from Linus Torvalds.
3. Thou shall not utter slander againt thy name, including any support for open-source movements, Cygwin, and Linux.
4. Remember to keep the operating system sacred. Six days a week you shall labor and do work. The seventh day is reserved for reinstalling Windows.
5. Honor the privilages imposed by thy parent processes.
6. Thou shall not press Ctrl-Alt-Del.
Thou shall also not terminate a process.
7. Thou shall not network with other platforms.
8. Thou shall not defeat DRM.
9. Thou shall not spoof any packets.
10.Thou shall not covet thy neighbor's CPU, or any hardware that belongs to your neighbhor.
While I'd agree that major differences in language do not imply major differences in thinking, I would still assert that there are very subtle parts of language that directly affect how you allow yourself to analyse abstract concepts.
For example, one language (Chinese) does not really easily allow you to talk to another person unless you know their status in relation to yours (social superior, social inferior, social equal). Because of that, the first thing you need to think about regarding another person before you go on to other thoughts is their status in relation to yours. Now take another language, English, where it is very difficult to talk about a person unless you know whether they are a man or a woman. Therefore, to facilitate matters, you are always in the habit of clarifying if someone is a man or a woman if it unclear, even if it is technically irrelevant for your purposes. In Chinese, this presents no problem as long as you know their status.
A lot of this happens so subconsciously and quickly that it's difficult to really gauge that it happens at all. However, I'd be willing to bet that if you asked English speakers and Chinese speakers if they knew of people, but did not know their gender (and perhaps the number of people who have that status), I would expect English speakers would have a lower "Yes" response.
Language doesn't affect overall thinking processes, but it subtly affects priorities, qualitative factors, and categorization. In other words, two intelligent people with two different languages would reach the same conclusions (about objective matters), but they could use different means to reach those conclusions. Learning another language can make you aware of the limitations of your language, and minimize the effects of those limitations. But there are plenty of people who speak only one language.
just use english and don't worry about it. i guess in a worst case scenario you could use pig latin or esperanto.
I once attended a glorious lecture "Computing 3000BC to 1945". Ada Lovelace is probably the most famous "first programmer" but there are clear bits of evidence that there were programmers before. Some of the weaving loom systems supported loops and other programming constructs.
Turings genius was to get from adhoc discovery to the mathematics behind it , and turn a collection of interesting discoveries into a science
Probably you won't know the word, but I'm pretty sure you know the emotion.
Takka vrt frvz, vvive targle non.
Zigga ton bon fall gras, mitsa gal fal fib grafta. Giggla barty loki wadow, diggle flar try growl. Gogga monka bar frat barty loki a tine, gonda barty lokin mine vort. Vigga try wida loki null; lokin barty vrt frvz.
Dig, hoki hack barty wadow?
--
Kinna Soviet Russia, barty loki vrt frz you!
++
Suddenly, in my library I have a print of Panjali's Mahabhasya, which is an ancient commentary to fragment of Panini's excelent grammar of sanskrit. It contains original text of Panini's, which begins with a verse:
Atha sabdaanusaasanam.
which interprets and translates (by me):
atha sabda anu-sa-asanam
here-topic (is) sound detail-layout
Of course, this grammar and semantics theory of the human (and godly) language predates many centuries our western cybernetics theoreticians of the XX. Sanskrit grammar was formally canonized by Panini as well as today's standards of computer coding languages. No other human language before esperanto and modern programing languages was result of such scientific effort.
Some 20 years ago, it was not a surprise for me, being a programmer and yogi adept at the same time, that the world is "programable" by language. Old magicians and siddhas of ancient times knew the "keywords", even today called "mantras" which enabled to operate the universe itself.
IT IS THE LANGUAGE WHICH CREATES A REALITY.
Because it is the same language which operates a mind. And we should ourselves made some effort to operate both of them correctly.
There you are, staring at me again.
Well I'm not a linguist but a programming language isnt a process of thought - it is a process of communication and that means you need both the grammatical constructs and vocabulary to express the concepts involved.
Vocabulary seems less of a problem - lots of languages have words that are sentences to explain in others (hiraeth, zeitgeist etc) but I guess thats no different to a perl programmer and a C programmer arguing about regexp processing. Clearly you can also disambiguate damage ("I had a sandwich") [did you own it or eat it ?] doesn't cause a problem in English even though its ambiguous
In some ways we know the language and mathematics itself limit the computer - there are things mathematics cannot express for one.
There are also more fundamental concepts you have to have (passive/active, third party viewpoints, what-if, condition/action, past/present/future/habitual/. and stuff like negation and question words) but I would assume all language has those.
The thing that makes me most sceptical is that I've heard many asian speakers say they think differently in English, and there is also some brain scan evidence of different activity areas. But I don't speak any asian languages and I'm not likely to be learning Mandarin or Cantonese just to find out 8)
Likewise all high level computer programming languages tend to have things they cannot directly express. Fortran for example has no way to express "fiddle with CPU register foo"
Alan
When we're all speaking Hindi or Mandarin (except the managers & shareholders) it won't really matter...
My dad had to learn German as a kid, because church service was conducted only in German. As a kid I recall going to church with grandma and grandpa, and while service had switched to English (I've now found out it was less than 5 years previous) hymns were often sung in German, and often the preacher did switch to german. Remember I was a kid - I recall the german clearly, but I don't know if it was often really amounts to. They switch to English only after the last member of the church who didn't know English died.
That is typical of immigrants, many never learn the natives language, but the kids do.
Unfortunately knowing German as a kid doesn't help my dad. German in Germany changed drasticly over the last 100 years, while the language he learned did not. Even more than the difference between Modern English and the English of Shakesper. OTOH, Germans who want to read those old letters stored in the attic have to send them to the US and get them translated into English, because most who can read old German live in the US and speak English but not modern German.
OK, so granted, there are a lot of languages disappearing(new scientist article). And granted, there may be some bits of insight in ancient sanskrit text (panini & CS paper) with application to computer language design. I fail, however, to see the connection. The submitter doesn't appear to have RTFA (the panini one) he linked to! It's not about finding insight in sanskrit itself, it's about finding insight in the writings of someone USING sanskrit. Now, being that most of the languages falling by the wayside are small dialects in backwater areas, I suspect that a) they don't have a lot of linguistic analysts in their ancestry, and b) even if they did, there are no written recordes to study!
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
i hope that we will be clever enough to keep several languages on our lovely blue planet. i have learned french as i grew up and english then spanish. i find it really amazing when i meet people that spent time to learn the difficult french and use it with us, knowing how deceptive and complicated it can be. and a year ago i started to learn russian, more for the fun of it really. and i discovered russian poetry. honestly, i now believe that you cannot realize how potent and shivering poetry can be if you have not read and understood it in russian. it was like all the years i had spent reading poetry before made me walk the wrong path. well, languages are a treasure as some feelings and concepts seem to widen and induce feelings when expressed in a language than another.
and as one famous kligon said : you cannot really appreciate shakespeare if you have not read the original version in kligon :D
dont know what did happen but my message got posted as anonymous coward. it's me that wrote it :)
If you lack the words and grammar, you can have the thought but it is extremely difficult to do much more than that with it. Analysis or expression of the thought is difficult to impossible
You say that, but it isn't true. It's very much possible to analyse and express a thought which doesn't have a word assigned to it. Also, what do you mean by "lacking the grammar"? I'd be interested to see an example of the grammar of a language making a thought unexpressable. Most supposed examples of this have been thoroughly debunked.
How do you think, except in terms of those convenient labels?
New concepts can be expressed by combining existing labels. This is just standard compositionality of meaning, and it's fundamental to all human and computer languages. What makes you so sure we can only think in terms of "convenient labels"? It's just not the case that people think in terms of whatever words there are available -- otherwise, why would people keep rephrasing their sentences to make what they were trying to say clearer, and how would people learn the meanings of words? It's obvious that there is not an easy or transparent mapping from thought to sentence.
Does a B&W photograph or television look realistic? With no words for color, no means of expressing any difference in color, the perceived differences in color just become part of the background noise.
Rubbish, there are subtle differences in colour which I can't describe very effectively in English, but I certainly notice them if they're important. Also, while they may describe colours differently, people who speak these languages certainly do not perceive the world in black and white -- I'm sure they could tell the difference between something red and something green if it was important (e.g. red berries kill you, green berries don't). Imagine that we had to deal with a similar situation, but the different berries were subtly different shades of purple. We might not be able to describe the difference in colour to other people using English, we'd have to get them to look at the different berries, but you can bet that unless the difference in colour was very subtle, they'd have no problem remembering the difference. We perceive differences in colour because we have rods and cones; language can't change our biology.
The idea that language affects thought is basically discredited these days. Nobody seriously suggests that language affects thought in anything more than a very limited way. Imagine what would happen if we tried to work out how English speakers thought:
"English has essentially 3 tenses: past, present and future. English speakers tend to perceive all events as either taking place in the past, present, or future and find it difficult to express ideas about ongoing or perpetual events."
Of course ask any English speaker if that's true and they'll tell you it isn't, but that's basically the sort of half-arsed pseudo-analytic twaddle that most of these language-affecting-thought myths are based on.
If someone no longer wants to speak a dialect that only a few hundred others use, who is to say that they are doing the wrong thing? Should they be 'protected' from outside cultures and technologies that may actually benefit them? If so, doesn't this mean that they are being effectively forced to retain their existing languages, most likely to their detriment?
These days, the loss of languages is not happening due to imperial conquest or forced re-education like in the past, but due to people changing their behavious for their own benefit. After all, given a choice wouldn't you prefer to use English and have the ability to potentially communicate with billions, versus some dialect only used in your village?
Oh, and New Guinea is hardly a good example of the benefits of multiple languages - the country is corrupt and impoverished, and many people in the highlands live a practically stone-age existance.
I'm no expert on India, but your claim that I should think of the people of India does not apply. Remember, Britton ruled India for many years, they brought with their language when they ruled. Even those who were willing to learn the native language (instead of making the natives learn English) would find it hard to succeed because there are 18 different common languages in India, and few people speak many.
In short, while few people in India speak English as their first language, it is your best choice if you want to speak to a random person on the street and you don't know the local language.
Why do you think India is a popular place to outsource tech support to? There are a large number of people who know English and consider $20/day riches beyond belief. Of course the downside isn't discovered until latter when you realize that most speak with a thick accent that is hard for Americans to understand. (I'd presume the English have the same problem)
Slashdot is WAY overdue for some fire and brimstone.
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
Prior to this surely must be Welsh, a computer language without vowels may be possible; but a spoken language? Gwt thw fwck yut wf hyrw.
Or has Linus quit Using make(1) since I last compiled a kernel? A quick serach of my 2.0.36 machine reveals awk, assembly, TCL/TK, and sh are all used too. All are programing languages and turing complete (except awk? I've never used awk so I'm not sure, but I know the rest are)
Linus uses the best tools for the job. I strongly doubt he has written his own make programs just so he can avoid a programing languages that does the job better. I suspect menuconfig has been re-written to be a lot better since 1998, but I'm sure Linus is perfectly willing to use the best tool for the job. C is an excellent tool for kernel programing, so that is what is mostly used. (though there is some assembly where needed)
a Hindi and an Urdu speaker can understand each others language as well as an Englishman can understand American English. Know why? Because they're pretty much the same damn language with different scripts (Urdu has a few more Persian words and Hindi has a few more Sanskrit words, but both have a HUGE common vocabulary).
Chomsky's position is that people have language organs in their brain that define a Universal Grammar (UG) of syntax. It is this UG that explains why no natural language exhibits the full power of a context sensitive grammar. [Chomsky takes this position because he denies that meaning has any effect on syntax.]
Now the funny thing is that given all the noise made over UG very little if anything is known about it. There is not some large collection of rules. In fact every time someone says something like "this english construction behaves the way it does because of a constraint from UG" somebody goes and finds a language like Malagasy where the constraint does not hold and thus it cannot be a part of UB.
Have you read George Orwell's 1984? It describes a tyranical world that goes to great lengths to prevent any form of dissent. One of the things that is happening in the world is that a new language called 'Newspeak' is being developped. The idea is that 'Newspeak' is a language that is designed to prevent the expression of ideas that go contrary to the system. It's basically a simplified form of English, but if you think in 'Newspeak', you are less likely to form a rebelious idea. Of course, 'Newspeak' is only a hurdle to those peole who don't think abstractly enough.
different ways of thinking.
There is not much difference between English and Spanish, but between Japanese and Spanish/English, there is, you have to think in a different way to speak Japanse.
There is a language in South America, I forget the name, that uses ternary logic. Traditional mathematics teaching isn't effective with the kids that speak that language.
As I see it, losing human languages will be bad for computer languages innovation. We'll be almost stuck with what we have now.
How successful are Tolkien's languages? And how much are they based in existing lanugages?
"Do not drill any holes in your cat - it will not like it."
-- Nick Davies
To be blunt: No they don't.
As someone who is fluent in three languages, I'd have to say that yes, they do. I sometimes sub-vocalize in different languages when I'm trying to things through. However, I don't think it's an absolute law; it's just that certain concepts are easier in some languages than others. Try translating "ombudsman" from Swedish. Oh wait, in English it's "ombudsman"... why?
Simply put, different languages make it harder or easier to express certain concepts, and I suspect that it follows that those who speak only one language will have their thought patterns affected by this.
There is a much better example of how language affects thought, and one that I have yet to see a linguist mention: mathematics. Take general relativity and tensor algebra. Einstein spent most of the time between his publishing Special relativity and General simply learning a new mathematical language, one that was better suited to expressing the concepts in his theory. The same sort of thing happened in the development of quantum mechanics (bra-kets anyone?) or even calculus (differential notation).
Language may only be a tool for expressing an underlying thought, but as the saying goes "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
we have a hundred years left. If it ain't discovered in that time, maybe it wasn't worth discovering.
not blunt answer: yes and...no, language DOES SLIGHTLY limit thought, because the structure of a given lang favors certain ways of thinking, pure thought is unusual or so I think(unless you have very simple thoughts: blue, sex...), You usually *think* in your language terms, be english, spanish, japanese, deutsch...etc
The most limiting part be real or perceived, appears when this thought becomes expressed, then is when the language limitations(not to mention the user's) come more heavily into play.
Language isn't merely a labeling system, vocabulary is only a brick, the cement and disposition of these components are more important
i.e. english isn't my native lang and I find hard to be very specific while using it, it always have a certain ambiguity, that my spanish doesn't, unless I'm really trying to be vague, don't ask me why, but when using german I kinda sound angered/dead-serious or very polite(and more vague) when japanese.
I can transmit the idea in several langs but it won't come across *exactly*, I believe language affects mostly the message/messenger but little the thought-process of said messenger or the receiver, and the effect on thought is more in that it facilitates some avenues of thinking.
To think about:
-Moon and sun have gender in english?
-Why moon is male in german but female in spanish? moon=cold, serious, menacing, dark, men attributes according to germans, funny, but to spanish speakers is the other way: misterious, beatiful, soft, soothing.
-moreso spanish and german provide a gender to things(germans go an add a neutral 'das'), english doesn't, and japanese simplifies even more: no gender a no quantity, so neko could be cat,cats, either male or female hu?.
Smokin' & rubying away
Well Henry Miller, you should learn a little more on India first, before you make such a gross comment....
There may be many languages in India, but knowing just 2-3 would allow one to communicate with a large segement of the population.
Hindi is an official 'national' language of India. The idea is that people in all states would speak Hindi as well as their local language. Most of the central/northern states speak languages derived from Sanskrit (which I believe Hindi to be one). Even though many of these languages have different scripts, the sounds and words are fairly simliar.. Much like the way French, English, Spanish have some simliar words and very simliar scripts. (The Indian languages differ much more in script than those European languages).
This means you can go to many places in India and speak Hindi and be understood.
Now the educated in India also speak English. While they may have some accent, they often speak English very well, and with perfect grammar. There are many sounds in any/all of the Indian languages that do not exist in the English Language. I mean to say that they make many more distinctions between two sounds than an American English speaker would make. For example, there are two different "r" and two different "rh" sounds in Bengali, but they sound absolutely identical to American English speakers. Granted, some sounds in the English language do not exist there (like the sound for x).
Now there is a small catch to this idea of Hindi being the universal language. The South Indian languages are not derived from Sanskrit. The adoption of Hindi as a national language caused *quite* a bit of resentment there. Thus they have adopted English and their common language.
Thus an English-only speaker can fare better than an Hindi-only speaker there! Keep in mind, Hydrabad is located in Southern India, which is where I would guess that a large number of the outsourced jobs are going.
Lastly, there are more people that speak Bengali in India than there are Americans in the US.
The Indian film industry cranks out more than 800 films per year, with a large part of that being Hindi....
Speaking of jobs to outsource, I wish law were outsourced there. Lawyers there are very modest, and do not charge the exorbitant fees that they do here.
Granted, people in some rural villages may not know Hindi or English. But then they probably have no use of technology jobs or tourism. They lead simple lives, don't need a lot of money (they are self-sufficient), don't need a car, don't pay huge insurance premiumns, don't live in a polluted cities, don't fight rush-hour traffic, and don't suffer from the kinds of stress that we do...
Do you think that Americans don't have an accent? If we outsourced tech support to rural Louisiana/Mississippi/Alabama, the people in western and northern US states wooden't understood a thang!
But in chinese Gender is already part of the status... goh is older brother, mui is younger sister... gender is already denoted...
So in both cases(English and Chinese) I would think you should already know of the gender...
Do you talk with perform something varying this by that until the-other?
How about "fold all the clothes in this basket"? That'd be "for each in basket, fold this" in pseudocode, iterators in C++ STL, or (map fold basket) in Scheme. Sure, they don't match at the level of syntax, but the semantics match exactly, which is more important at some levels to linguists. One can change syntaxes arbitrarily; it takes thought to come up with new semantics.
Ancient Athens in the fourth century BC had a population of only around 60 thousand (less than 30 thousand if you only count those who were allowed to become educated) and yet the philosophy, science, mathematics, literature, and political thought that it produced overwhelmingly dwarfs (for instance) the suburbs of Atlanta, which contain many times more people with a much more widespread access to education and literacy.
Disclaimer: I am not an expert on Ancient Athens, so I welcome any insight on the following theory.
Did the incredible leaps in many disciplines come because the population was small? Or did they happen because there were a few great thinkers who impressed their students with enough different ideas that the ideas were expanded and elaborated in a dominant culture so the ideas survived and spread.
It seems that most of the thinkers in Ancient Athens were influenced by Socrates, who got his ideas from Archelaus, who learned from Anaxagoras. If these men had lived in Messenia, the world may have lost their ideas.
(Sorry if I sound like Ayn Rand, but I believe one great programmer is worth 20 mediocre programmers. The correlation would be that a few great thinkers have much greater influence than tons of mediocre thinkers.)
In Ancient Athens, "philosophy, science, mathematics, literature, and political thought" were very closely related subjects. Today each is considered a separate discipline. Scientists and mathematicians do not want to consider the philosophy or politics of their work. (American) Politicians are sometimes proud of their lack of knowledge about the sciences. Does the separation help because we focus more, or does it hurt because it is more difficult for ideas to transfer between disciplines?
- Example: The horrors of "monoculture" were only noticed because the word "virus" is used by both biology and computer science. What other ideas from biology could advance the infant science of computers? People have started checking biology for ideas, but what about other sciences? Maybe tectonics has good ideas about integrating large masses of code.
--- Off-topic
Anybody else notice the correlations between Ancient Athens and the U.S.? Both started well with a class system that encouraged slavery. Slavery was abolished. The main product (wheat for Athens; cotton/manufacturing for the US) was offshored, so they moved to a secondary but more profitable export (olive oil and wine; technology). Both were major economic centers for their time. Both were attacked by Persia, although the US has survived so far.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
We are the US. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.
Must-not-watch TV!
what, funny symbol befor other funny symbol, except after third funny symbol?
As if the letters i, e, and c themselves aren't just "funny symbols"? Very few writing systems have symbols that aren't just "funny" ("arbitrary" in linguistese). Such exceptions include Hangul (used for Korean) and Tengwar (used for Quenya and Sindarin), both of which show patterns of correspondence between the phonetic features of a sound and the shape of the corresponding letter.
There seems to be an underlaying tone that loss of diversity in languages is a bad thing? Why? I don't get it - if the native speakers of a language find it more useful to learn another language isn't that prima facia proof that the new language is better, again, for whatever reason? If a whole freaking culture disappears, who cares? Cultures are like any other living system - got a niche, good. Need a niche? Find one or die!
Don't worry, if the planet gets smacked by a meteor and we get sent back to the stone age, diverse languages will evolve again, but as long as the world is ever more connected, doesn't it stand to reason, that eventually, all the connected people will converge on a common lingua franca?
BTW, I am a non-linguistic nerd, and even I recognise several language roots in my previous couple of sentences.
I don't speak any of the languages that my ancestors spoke, and I don't expect my kids to know COBOL, either.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
where if you tally all the various slang terms from, for example, skiers and snowboarders, you can get a few dozen as well.
And if you tally cocaine addicts' words for "snow", you get a few dozen more as well.
Man, I love Slashdot. So many people who think they're smart, trying so hard to sound like they know what they're talking about. This isn't directed at you specifically, parent. Just to the frustration I have sometimes listening to the bs that we geeks post. It's funny because when you think about how we ream non-technical people that talk about technical stuff as if they knew what they were talking about (hit them with the cluestick, right?) but then we in turn seem quite keen on turning around and trying to sound knowledegable when in fact, we aren't.
Ok, now to get back on topic. The idea that language affects thought is known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and is widely discredited today. I'm not about to sit around and teach you dorks linguistics, but if you're curious, google awaits.
Oh, and I just found this cool link, if you already know something about Sapir-Whorf. It talks about non-linear time systems in Native American Languages and what Whorf was really about, claiming that he actually had little to do with hypothesis he is named after. Interesting read. See, you learn something knew everyday. It postulates that Whorf's idea of linguistic relativity is actually a spin on Einstein's use of the word. Who knew?
Link: Sapir-Whorf and what to tell students these days
Well as it happens, the majority of the people I've met from India (used to work with them) are from southern India, where as you said, Hindi is not a popular language. I know their perception of India influences mine. I don't think my statement is too grossly generalized. All generalizations are false though, something I hope everyone remembers. Then again I would hope everyone remembers to be polite but everyone forgets that once in a while too...
I agree, outsourcing tech support to the southern US wouldn't be a good idea, as most people have trouble understanding their accents. Same reason I don't reccomend outsourcing to India, not that those people don't speak a language I can understand, but that it is a lot of effort to understand them. Yes I have met people from India that speak English better than me (it isn't hard) with an accent that while different is easy to understand. Most however speak and English that I can understand only if I put effort into it. If English is your first language, odds are we can hold a conversation without both of us having to think about understanding the other (the main exception is the deep south US), this not true for the majority of Indians. I can hold a conversation with anyone who speaks enough English, but it is hard work in some cases.
this is by far the dumbest article i've read this year.. who gives a flying f##k. Weeping about what one has yet to loose. Boo Hoo, allow me to play the finger violin for you.. /me plays finger violin, as people everywhere weep..
You obviously don't speak Chinese very well. Or maybe you're doing the whole "Chinese, Japanese, whatever, they all have slanted eyes" thing in your recollection, because the Asian language most associated with the concepts you outlined in your post is Japanese, not Chinese. Intrinsically, when you speak Chinese, the only special thing you need to keep in mind is ni3 versus nin2, with the former being informal and the latter being more respectful. Sometimes you might use indirection to be particularly polite, but at that point you've left the realm of language and entered the realm of culture. That they have two different words for you is no more complex than 99% of European languages (french: tu, vous, german: du, Sie, spanish: tu, usted, middle english: thou, you).
Japanese is somewhat more involved, with every verb having an informal and formal form, and with many common verbs having a seperate, honorific form for particular occasions; the polite prefix o- (ie, omizu), the disdain of anata (you) in favor of the third person so as not to address people directly, etc, etc.
But I can speak Japanese, Chinese, French, German or whatever in a formal or informal way; it's nothing intrinsic in the language, it's just part of the culture. I would not be incorrect, in any linguistic sense, if I chose to use the Chinese ni3 instead of nin2, but I might be making a cultural faux pas. Do you understand the distinction?
No, not THAT Worf.
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Score 3? For what? Being wrong, at length? - smirkleton
I've often wondered if it would be easier to program computers with Chinese characters.
Perhaps each character could represent a low-level primitive function with standardized send and return parameters.
Perhaps parallel computers could be 'programmed' with Chinese characters having the horizontal characters represent threads and the vertical arrangement of characters represent something else. The pre-compilier would rearrange the characters for their optimal parallel process and the main compilier turn the optimal processes into machine language.
We need to start thinking of ways to get order-of-magnitude increases in the productivity of programmers that matches the great increases in computer hardware productivity.
There is a Malthusian parallel to computer progress: Software productivity increases arithemeticly slowly while hardware productivity increases exponentially.
One question is: if you saw another type of logic, would you be able to recognize it by itself instead of using your current frames of reference? Heh heh.
It's an interesting problem, because the things that computers do today are pretty straight-ahead. I'm sure that 40% of the people reading this can reverse-engineer most systems/programs just by hearing a description of how those systems behave.
So what kinds of systems are impossible to describe right now? I suppose those would be predictive systems, like weather or human behavior, drug modeling, etc. In fact, modeling is in need of its own type of language and logic, because in models things happen because of conditions that aren't necessarily known beforehand - the system is non-deterministic.
Right now (from what I gather) simulating a non-deterministic system is a real PITA. And they're hard to code, too, becuase everything is happening at once. So you timeslice everything, but it's not quite the same.
Now what would be really, really useful would be a general-purpose analog computer. When you deal in the analog realm, you don't really have to do a lot of the gruntwork because the nature and properties of the medium take care of a lot of that. I think what analog computing boils down to is designing feedback loops - I have a vague understanding of analog computing, most of it from a lot of layman reading of cognitive sciences, genetics/genomics, etc. The downside is there may be on the order of a few hundred thousand or million interactions that need to be designed, but that probably compares favorably to the amount of code that'd be written otherwise.
Anyway, I'm just sort of rambling on, but it's interesting stuff to think about.
How will the extinction of the American Programmer affect programming languages?
"Methinks the language can be and is limiting.
If you lack the words and grammar, you can have the thought but it is extremely difficult to do much more than that with it. Analysis or expression of the thought is difficult to impossible."
"I think this analogy is flawed.. I may be able to see a whole world full of colour, but without words to describe it, how do I share those thoughts?"
Both of you need to go back and actually read NTiOzymandias' post. S/He never said that expression didn't rely on language, s/he was talking about the independence of *thought* from language.
There is something important lost when the speakers of a language die, yes. But what is lost is not any concept, pattern of thought, or way of looking at the world. Because there is no concept that you cannot translate across the language barrier. There is a word in Russian, I've heard, for that feeling you get when your ex walks into the room. But just because there is no word for it in English doesn't mean that I couldn't just explain it to you. Just because some Native American languages do not have the same adverbs for time that English does doesn't mean that speakers of those languages have no concept of time.
Just out of curiousity, how would you go about proving this "fact", that nothing is lost in translating across languages? Until people learn to read minds, it cannot be done. Here's something else to think about: how would you explain the Engplish phrase "Give it that old college try" _in English_? Do you really think that the explanation would properly capture the meaning of the phrase?
See, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is not exactly discredited. The strong version of it (that thought is determined by language) is almost certainly wrong, but weaker versions are still debated. If nothing else, language influences one very important aspect of our thinking: how we will use our language! (And any other related behaviors, at times including gestures, posture, and so on.)
I suspect that your professor(s) take a strong position on one side of this debate and have not presented the other side as thoroughly as it deserves.
One language is better, more efficient. There was this language designed that sounds similar to europa, euroka, in witch for example adverbs end only with "a", verbs with another letter, and very easy to pronounce and write. There should be one language, which is easy to write and speak. Obviously English can't be the one, even though it the most popular today because the writing system sucks. There should be one character for one sound. There are phonetically written languages like Romanian, it has very few quirks, Latin. The problem with English, is that when a word was taken from another language, it was still spelled the same, which is stupid. That is "A", "E", "I", "G", "J" and many other letters have different pronunciations. Many countries have done spelling reforms to their own languages in the last century, like Turkey. I believe that the English language should have a spelling reform too. English should have a spelling reform on the international level and adopted by every English speaking country. Right now, the international English, is the England English (noticed, that I have no said British since the Scots, Walsh, Irish have some different things). I use speak the England English, and spell the words like colour, dialogue, centre and so on the normal way, even though I live in the United States.
thanks for the link, learn something everyday ne, anyway googling for said theory concludes that a strong determinism of thought upon the language used is an error, and indeed I think so, if You have cared to read with more detail you would notice that I agreed that thought is affected by language but is minimal(which part of SLIGHTLY didn't get?), the real effect comes after you comunicate those thoughts. That's my experience and wouldn't change 'til it shows me otherwise. besides this is /. ;-)
Smokin' & rubying away
"proud owner of a mensa card"
CHECK THE NAME ON THE CARD
this bitchass mugged me fo it.
bitch.
Agreed - but for the sake of the readers who have no experience with other Human languages, I will offer the following:
If you know an object-oriented language like C++ or Java, try learning Prolog. Then see if you don't suddenly find yourself writing programs differently, and integrating pattern-matching concepts differently in your programs.
It all translates (eventually) to Assembly, so there should be nothing Prolog can do that C++ can't do. And you still contain the same brain, and the same knowledge of Computer Science, and you don't think only in C++, so there shouldn't be a difference there either. But there is.
I was reading an interview in the New Scientist about a linguist who specialises in obscure languages.
According to her there is a language belonging to an Amazonian tribe where you *have* to put how you know something. For example, if you say that Jack told you something you have to also say how he told you. For example if he phoned you you would say "Jack told me, non-visually."
With examples like that, I'd have to say that it is perfectly possible for language to define how a society operates and how people think.
Take for example also the Chinese language. The Chinese language is tonal. This means that songs that people write have to take this into account so that people can actually understand what you're singing. Modern songs aren't so bad esp. Mandarin songs as Mandarin only has a few tones and is much more forgiving of tonal mistakes. But Cantonese has 7 and older Chinese languages have 9. They figure out how to sing centuries old songs where only the lyrics survive by working out the tones of the words. That is an example of the language influencing the entire musical heritage of the culture. I've also noticed that word plays are much more popular in Chinese and Japanese than in English, because there are so many words that sound similar. In English you only have a limited subset of words for familial relations. In Chinese, there is a title for practically every permutation of familial relation you can have. For example the wife of your father's older brother has a different title to the wife of your mother's young brother and to your father's older sister and to your mother's older sister and your father's younger brother's wife etc. etc. Also close non-blood ties are usually expressed in family terms like big brother or Uncle (one of the many terms for uncle depending on if they are your father or mother's friend and whether they are older or younger than your father/mother), or little sister etc. Hell, there is a tradition in many families of choosing given names that reflect which generation you are so when you meet someone from your family you can tell how senior/junior they are to you from their names (this practice became defunct after the Communists) This just displays the importance of family in China. That the Chinese think in terms of family units and family ties waaaay more than native English speaking cultures do. In fact even government structure is seen in terms of family with the Emperor being the "father" of the nation and the obedience people have to the Emperor being seen as the same sort of obedience a son owes his father. This is embodied in Confucianism - though note that Confucius merely put together what people had already thought for a long time. That is a very large difference in thinking that is reflected in the different languages.
Also looking at 1984, the entire focus on Newspeak was to get rid of words like "freedom" (or subvert their meaning). It is much harder to think of a concept if you don't have a word for it.
I disagree with the statement that new versions of Chinese will spring up. If you look at China, Mandarin is so wide-spread in the north because of the Central Plains region. Good geography easy spread. Language diversity and genetic diversity is much larger in the south due to the much more difficult terrain of the south which limits the spread of languages. This also made the south much more easily defensible than the north as has been shown many times in Chinese history with the Yangtze river the single greatest defensive barrier in China (esp. against northerners who don't know how to fight on water). It was a lot more useful than the Great Wall ever was. The reason why they didn't diversify more was because the Chinese Empire was very good at reintegrating those regions back into the Empire after every time the Empire broke up and there were a lot of migrations from the north esp. masses of refugees during times of turmoil in the north. Modern technology makes the geographical reasons for the language diversity in the south null.
a Hindi and an Urdu speaker can understand each others language as well as an Englishman can understand American English.
Not quite that much, but definitely on the level of colloquial exchanges you're right. On abstract topics, talking politics and other more "elite" subjects, they diverge enough that the speakers often won't be able to understand (though the grammar stays the same). And the different script *does* make a difference when you're trying to do any kind of business with anyone beyond "I'll take two of those".
Either way, though, there are plenty of Indian languages that are completely different from each other. My wife speaks Tamil, which is great in Tamil Nadu or thereabouts, but no help at all when we're in the north of India anywhere, since neither of us knows more than a few scraps of Hindi.
Guess what we spoke? Yep, English. There seemed to me to be a greater percentage of people in India who spoke English than I remember running into in Europe, actually.
Which in a way is weird (to argue against my own point above) because I think Hindi is required in schools in most of the Indian states, even though the "home" language is often something else, PLUS the attraction of the Hindi Bollywood movies is huge... so in general, an Indian trying to talk to another Indian would still have Hindi in common.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
The fight in code between Color and Colour is out of control in some case of diff patchs correcting both ways. Less Languages Less fighting Faster development. Programming langs have been created and died out basicly there will be less.
That what is [question sentence form]?
:p
Japanese is a fantastic language, one well worth studying. And it's most definitely SOV
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Only people that can see will ever truly understand RED color, how do you get that concept across to a blind person? You can describe it to them, but will they ever truly conceptualize RED apples and YELLOW apples the way people do that see?
It's close enough that I understand the concept they are trying to get across. Explain the color red to a blind person though and you have truly done something.
American Football rules because nobody care this sport but US !
... ) you know the one you play with your foot over a ball :)
;-)
....
(unlike baseball that some country like Japan are adicted too)
#1 world "mass" sport is AFAIK, Football (i mean soccer as UK call it, or also called futebol, fuBball,
Is there anyone that knows why American "Football" is called so ? Should we call it "American Rugby" instead ? Because practically this is an "deregulated" Rugby
Any clue will help on those naming
The word "algorithm" encripts the name of the first programmer - Al Gore ;-).
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
This is Eric's field
I'd like to read his off the cuff opinion.
For example, "I", "we", "you", "and", "the" etc. are all monosyllabic, and not without reason.
The desire to express concepts without providing explanation constantly is what leads us to, for example, use the word "schadenfreude" -- it only has to be explained once as a concept, then we can use the shorthand word with a given group of people.
Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Gates M'dna wgah'nagl fhtagn.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Programming languages are for humans!
Of course they must be interpreted by computers, but the reason they exist is that humans (the author, or someone else) must be able to understand what is going on.
So it's very important to find expressions for humans to understand and use. Perhaps natural languages can have some undiscovered gems for us.
On the other hand, there are far more programming languages than natural languages already, we're quite capable of inventing new ways to say things without knowing hundreds of existing ways in advance.
I am a linguist and a programmer (it seems to be a popular combination). There are languages that don't have past/present/future/habitual (often they'll mark words for finished action and ongoing action instead). There are languages that do without negation-words and question-words (you don't need the latter in English either, just think about it). Whether all languages have active/passive is debatable (they all have a way of not having to mention the subject, but it won't necessarily work for all possible subjects), I did run across a language that uses the passive more often than the active... In short, you can think up just about any possible language (mis)feature (though there are no fully center-embedding Forth-like creatures out there, sorry), and somewhere, some language already does it, which is one of the main reasons language is so mind-bendingly cool.
:) And then of course there is a dialect of Quechua (or was it Aymara) which uses trinary logic throughout.
You can say anything in any language, the question is with how many words: some languages, like several South American ones and Turkish, insist that you grammatically encode whether you saw an action with your own eyes or just heard about it. Imagine what lawyers and cops could do with such languages
There is a branch of linguistics (names not mentioned to protect the guilty) that at least used to claim that since anything can be said in any language, you can learn everything about every language by studying English. Why this is bollocks is left as an excercise to the reader.
A reason that recording dying languages is the right thing to do that still haven't been mentioned is that it is important for generalized machine translation; it tells us what we can get away with not translating, what should be left ambiguous. Needless to say, you need MT for true AI.
Too bad for geeks? Computer languages will suffer? Come on, get some perspective.
Doesn't anybody realize that disappearance of a language usually also means a disappearance of a nation. I guess that doesn't mean much for a few hundred millions of dumb Americans, but it sure does for some smaller nations.
Subjective experiences aren't very good evidence here. There are (in my experience) other people who claim that being fluent in other languages doesn't allow them to think in new ways.
Language can certainly influence thought, however as you point out well it does not limit or control thought.
To use your example of light and dark, a healthy person without the color words would see colors but would not normally care about what color something was. They would just think about the dark and lightness of objects they see. Obviously, once they were told about colors and taught the labels they would be able to recognize colors. However, I bet it would probably not be automatic for a while, if ever.
Language abstraction is a powerful influence. The descriptors(language) one uses to abstract one's environment can influence or mislead if the language 1. lacks perspective or 2. overloads words using stereotypes
EX. 1 Many languages lack a description of time. Everything is described in the present tense. There is not even a word for time. This gives rise to some interesting cause and effect or non-linear logic and language constructs.
EX. 2 In Cypriot Greek the word for black spoken with the female gender suffix means: Black Woman, Servant, Maid, Slave, subservient wife. Someone who only speaks this language is probably misled into not holding black women in high regard until taught otherwise.
... was unpleasant. There were russified versions of Algol early on, but somehow it made me puke looking extremely clumsy.
;-).
The reason for that is that Russian lexics are very different from the English ones; the words are highly permutable and have many different forms through suffixes and endings. You need to use the correct form in every circumstances. English is much more simple and logical in this regard and in the others (such as much more restrictive grammar because of the lack of the same endings that Russian has).
On the other hand, my intuitive algorithm creating abilities seem to be much better than pretty much every native English speaker I've worked with. But it might be just me
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
I totally agree.
I believe in the weaker version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The problem is that it can never be more than a belief.
The main propblem with this hypothesis is that it is not falsifiable. Even if it is wrong it is impossible to prove so. That is as impossible as proving that the theory is right. Pity.
I've read a good example written for Russians trying to master English: "In English you need to know how your sentence will end when you start it".
My experience confirms that; most of my sentenses were too long and too quirky for Americans whether they were typical for the Russian grammar.
Also, English grammar and lexics is much more logical and thus restrictive. Russian is much more flexible.
So, in order to experess myself in English, especially verbally, I need to think differently.
Also, I've read about Chinese that it uses different brain areas because of being much more visual (versus languages with alphabets); it thus balances sides of the brain whether Western languages utilize the left, logical one more than the right one.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
you've written a lot, but all you've argued is that language is an active part of a culture.
that is obvious, and is not the same thing at all as the contentious argument that language affects or limits the nature of thought.
Some of the things you mention could safely be assumed to be universal across languages (e.g., negation). However, some of the things you mention are clearly not universal. For example, not all languages have a grammatical distinction between active and passive. (Plenty of Australian aboriginal languages don't.) And plenty of languages lack a grammatical category of tense (past/present/future), even though you can obviously convey the concept through other means (time words, e.g., "tomorrow"). Chinese is a good example. The loss of linguistic diversity means it will be harder to sort out what's essential and what isn't. (Neither tense nor active-passive are essential, whereas negation is.) The loss of linguistic diversity is therefore a real pity for linguistic theory, but whether this has any real consequence for computer science is debatable.
Culture depends on language a lot.
English is very "proper", restrictive language. Guess what - there is probably no other culture that depends on the laws and takes them into account that much. And it happened from the very old times.
German "ordung" also might be a result of a very logical language.
Unlike English speakers, Russians usually care about legality of something much less.
Chinese, as it was said here, care a great deal about social statuses. Thus, they think very differently when it comes to the status of opponent; their language and thinking reflect the hierarchical nature of their culture.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
How does a Belgian talk to a Belgian :-)
" In Cypriot Greek the word for black spoken with the female gender suffix means: Black Woman, Servant, Maid, Slave, subservient wife. Someone who only speaks this language is probably misled into not holding black women in high regard until taught otherwise."
Black hearted people want you to succum to the dark side and blacken your name with black balled people and dark desires. Come to the light and wash your heart white as snow from black sins. Beings of light fight the forces of darkness; join us, be white, be right, shine on!!!
This message brought to you by Mr. Pink Skin who loves his Afro neighbors. Ain't language a BITCH ?
"But they think, by and large, exactly the same as "us"."
I find that people of differing IQs think differently.
Above 120 think algebraicly.
Under 80 think here and now.
- (Chinese
... English)
Or take the Uplift series by David Brin (which I don't like, but hey - there are some interesting things in there), or the word "mu" which manyThe binary system may historically have been adopted in computing for its comparitively simple implementation, but the way it corresponds to everyday speech & thought is a bit uncanny: something is either true/false or black/white and so on. Which influenced which?
Take the question "have you stopped beating your wife yet?", or the statement (neo-Godwin alert) "you are either with us, or you are with the terrorists": they are gramatically properly formulated, and appear superficially legitimate - in English. But in Brin's speculated trinary system of thought and communication, the statements would probably seem just silly.
Finally, and as has already been stated in the discussion to this article: of course, all programming languages end up in binary machine code - but on the higher levels of abstraction, other things can be going on. Take OO: the silicon knows nothing of objects, but compared to procedural programming, it's a fundamentally different way of formulating, thinking about, and solving problems. Imagine (hey, it must already exist somewhere), a language which requires not just "if
/or something
yes, we have no bananas
I hate seeing the word "heuristics". To my mind, "heuristic" is an adjective, and whilst it may be used with a noun (e.g. "heuristic rules"), to just say "heuristics", is incorrect. A heuristic isn't a thing to be plauralised lightly.
> According to her there is a language belonging to an Amazonian tribe where you *have* to put how you know something. For example, if you say that Jack told you something you have to also say how he told you. For example if he phoned you you would say "Jack told me, non-visually."
This not uncommon. Whorf describes the same kind of feature in a northern american language (Pawnee??). This occurs too in many others northern american languages like Wintu.
The most important language with that kind of feature (the linguists word for it is "evidential") that I know of is Aymara, which is spoken by one and a half million people, around lake Titicaca, in the Andes.
A+,
I will talk about the Nahuatl (Aztec culture) customs since I am not familiar with my paisanos in the Mayan region's costumes or with my compadres of Peru and other regions of the glorious former Inca empire.
Human sacrifice most probably was vastly exagerated, it was in the interest of the Xian misionaries to make anything related to the aborigin religion look bad so it would be easier to justify the extreme measures to Christianize indigenous Americans. There are accounts that talk about sacrificial orgies of up to 20000 people in a session, but in spite of knowing exactly where all the main religious places in Mexico are, no probe has been found (mass graves, resaonable amounts of skeletons here or there) that human sacrifice was practiced in such widespread scale.
And no wonder. In Nahuatl culture the "paradise" was reserved only for the warriors that died in battle, which meant basically the nobility, since not everybody was allowed to capture enemies for human sacrifice. It was immensely valuable to capture enemies alive so they could be offered to the god in sacrifice, a warrior that killed all his enemies in war was considered unworthy.
The human sacrifice was required in order to save the world from ending, since the Sun demanded human blood to raise every day.
Compare that outcome of war (keep the universe going with the sacrifice of war prisioners) in Nahuatl culture to what was happening elsewhere: the populace launched against each other, diying in the benefit of the powerful and when dying, not receiving any dignified tretament but a hasstly burial to avoid diseases.
Perhaps if Nahuatl values had prevailed and permated to other societies, today the powerful would think twice before embarking in wars since their personal safety would be at stake,
Human sacrifice was abolished by tlatoani ("emperor") Moctezuma II a few years before the arrival of the Spanish to today's Mexico.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Language makes for a convenient labeling system, but it doesn't define your thoughts
I suspect that you don't speak more than one language right? I have a Chinese friend who (though she speaks near fluent English) constanly has trouble expressing her thoughts precisely in Engligh, simply because the correct words dont exists. English people have that problem occasionally, but not nearly as often she, or others learing English (or any second language) do. It's obvious that Chinese has signifigantly affected her thought process.
Have you ever tried formulating some thoughts without using language internally? Try it now. Pretend you don't know any language and try and consider some complicated idea or thought. It's pretty hard. Without language, all that's left to draw upon are primitive emotions and senses. You'll be able to summon up emotions, images, sounds, smells etc., but that's about it. Without language, high level thought is pretty much impossible.
Aw crap, ninjas!
Seems to me that it is generally more the language USER (or a language's use), rather than the language itself that falls short. A craftsman, for example, need not be limited by the tools at immediate disposal; rather that a craftsman could find, or even create, new tools to satisfy needs - for expression or functionality. Perhaps it is a Darwinian thing!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
I am a native Russian, but still I don't know a special word for that feeling you get when your ex walks into the room. I feel surprised. Could you please give this word?
Because of the structure of the Chinese language, specifically the structure of items and classifiers I wonder if Chinese programmers feel they have a better grasp of Object Oriented Programming?
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
Well, the fact that India was an English colony for a long time has something to do with it.
That's a great point. I'd say the single largest reason for English being so widespread was the massive reach of the British Empire. The people they conquered and colonized, of course, but also the people they did commerce with.
And the effect spreads -- the U.S. is the obvious example of a colony that broke off from Britain, but became a massive economic force using the English language.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
You should read up on computational linguistics. This includes Chomsky, but he can be a bit hard to digest for initiates.
We all think in the same structures at the most fundamental level. But I'm sure that the grammar of one's language may strengthen certain cognitive algorithms over others.
That fact that you "sub-vocalize" in different languages means, just as you point out, that some languages are better at expressing certain ideas than others. For instance, there's some native South American language which has a preponderance of verbs. It has many ways to express "to sleep", including several variations that indicate different qualities of sleep one has while in one's canoe! So, a single word would connote the action, "I was sleeping peacefully in my canoe", or "I will be sleeping lightly in my canoe, listening for the arrival of the herd for their afternoon watering". (These are just guesses, not actual examples.)
Now, back to my canoe....
For a nonhuman example, consider Calculus notation, which is totally impractical and difficult for common use. For everyday use, simple arithmetic works well and provides the "ease of use" we need for accomplishing everyday tasks. Calculus is out of place in our daily lives. Calculus is, however, a time-saving shorthand notation that greatly simplifies its intended domain. Calculus notation provides a speedy way to work out a problem of its type, while hiding the low-level mechanics from the human. Using simple arithmetic to solve a problem in the Calculus domain would display no "ease of use" at all. For instance, remember when Newton worked out his theories on gravity and orbital motions concisely in the Calculus. He later needed to re-write the proofs in much longer and more difficult geometry to present his ideas to others.
Now, for a human example, look at the Creole set of languages. These are the synthetic languages that were born when people of many tongues (often slaves) were brought together and were compelled to communicate with each other in order to cope with their foreign environment. The resulting languages were (at first) terribly inefficient at expressing complicated ideas. But they were awesomely efficient in their given task: to provide a common bridge among the babel of tongues.
Maybe there is a human language out there, whose design and model are best suited for AI? Maybe there is some language out there whose mechanics can greatly simplify some of our current horrendously complicated systems. Who knows. Maybe this really is akin to finding that miracle drug in the rain forest before the plants are extinct.
I was to post that myself.
... and thats why the Genesis starts with: in the begining there was nothing ... and than came 'logos'.
Indeed Sanskrit is one of the first artificial languages, but the same is true for Korean.
I think this is true for the most languages where you can find old mytical stories about a god bringing that language to man kind.
In old history a god usually was nothing special but a emporer who was praised like a god, e.g. like in old egyptian.
The "first" emporer of Korea is so famous because he united the country and gave the people "a language". So he became a *god*. Still today the korean language has not shifted very much away from the crafted language which was made about 3000 BC as far as I recall.
Ancient Greek IMHO was also adapted and morphed into a more or less artificial dialect
Because thats what mankind seperates from apes: logic.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
BZZZZZZZZT! WRONG!
Sorry, that's not Chinese.
Chinese doesn't require any knowledge of relative or absolute social status. Perhaps you were thinking of Japanese? My Japanese friends tell me that social status is a part of the Japanese language, exactly as you described.
Now take another language, English, where it is very difficult to talk about a person unless you know whether they are a man or a woman.
Wrong again, and this time you gave me a counter example. Proper English grammer would call for using: ``... unless you know whether he is a man or a woman.''. But that, or your common error, avoids the need to know the sex of the object of the sentence.
However, I'd be willing to bet that if you asked English speakers and Chinese speakers if they knew of people, but did not know their gender[sic] (and perhaps the number of people who have that status), I would expect English speakers would have a lower "Yes" response.
I'll ask some Chinese speakers that. I really doubt that you're right on this. We don't pay attention to a person's sex (not gender) because it's part of the language, we pay attention to this because we care. Language doesn't change that.
See what I've been reading.
IANALinguist, but from what I've read Sanskrit, as the term is used today, should basically be considered a constructed language. Panini took an already existing natural language, Prakrit, and squeezed it into his formal structure.
So yes, Panini's work is interesting from a historical perspective because he discovered context-sensitive and recursive grammars, but we can't make any claims about natural languages being valuable in the study of computer science. We can't even make claims about the cultural universality of certain grammar forms because Western linguists based a lot of their work on Panini.
Saying that Sanskrit is useful to computer science is like saying that Go is useful to mathematics. Yes, Go has very convenient formal properties, but that's because it's not a natural system!
To be blunter,
Yes they do. I just googled and found this link, but I read about this last year in New Scientist magazine.
As one example from the article, scitnsts studying linguistics looked at architectural styles from cultures where buildings, bridges, etc have masculine, feminine, and neuter terms for them. Correlating architecture to gender, there were discernable patterns.
To quote one tantalizing point from the article, "Boroditsky said she is now considering studying how the design of bridges - a masculine word in Spanish, but a feminine word in German - differs between the two cultures. "
and this one:
Another researcher has found evidence that languages which have many terms for color, such as English, give their speakers an advantage in remembering them.
The article (which I proudly ignored) is yet another example of a common journalistic practice - throwing a bunch of words together with the hope that they will somehow self-assemble to make a resemblance of being sensible and slapping a sensationalist conclusion (and a catchy headline) on top. Needless to say, there is no point worth mentioning. Sad that this practice appears to be spreading to popular science magazines.
:)
:-) Although it might be entertaining crap, who knows...
To elaborate:
1) loss of languages doesn't mean loss of our thoughts and ideas
2) it is unprofitable to mine these languages for ideas anyway, otherwise MS would be doing it (potential payoff is miniscule)
3) why would a language evolved in a society of hunters and gatherers be useful for programming I don't know (other than by sheer luck)
4) by the end of the 21st century I expect some progress to happen in computer science anyway. I doubt we will miss those languages then.
5) a forecast like this completely ignores any developments in AI which are likely to happen in the coming decades
Conclusion: don't waste your time on that article, it's likely to be crap.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
I literally could not care less. If we have to sacrifice an extra few years developing the next-gen programming languages (come on people, it's not like we'd NEVER figure it out without some esoteric ancestor of Hmong reminding us), it's a small price to pay in exchange for the ability to call up the Chinese mail order warehouse and explain--in one common tongue--that I ordered an ocean barge full of chrome and blue electric scooters, not the combination trampoline/tamborine home amusement kit.
(For those of you wondering, yes, they always mix those two up if you don't make sure you circle the kit number on the order form.)
sev
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
ummm, wouldn't fo' snizzle my nizzle be a conterexample? the population isolation you speak of will always exist. the distance just moves from geographic to psychological frames.
There are a number of ways of treating sentences like "this sentence is false" logically without throwing one's hands in the air and saying it is meaningless.
It's a well formed sentence in English grammar; it certainly seems to have a meaning -- that is, that the sentence is in some way not true. The problem lies in that it appears self contradictory.
What's needed is some sane way of dealing with things which are inconsistent. Paraconsistent logic is one such way, and if you ask me, a pretty strong case is made for it. Such a logical underpinning for mathematics would also mean that the potential for inconsistency in maths that can not be avoided (thanks, Goedel!) need not spell disaster.
Read up on it -- it's cool.
In English, that word is "impoverished".
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
If you took a picture of a cloud and then came back hours later, you'd be suprised if the cloud looked the same. Language and culture aren't museum artifacts preserved in a vacuum. They're living, breathing things that change each day. In cultures without writing, language can change so quickly that within just a few generations it may morph as dramatically as Latin has to French.
Latin, French, and now English have enjoyed a heyday as the lingua franca. Chinese or Hindi might be top dog tomorrow. Opposing English language influence seems as effective as promoting Esperanto.
"Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries!"
I'd be interested to see an example of the grammar of a language making a thought unexpressable. Most supposed examples of this have been thoroughly debunked.
So what you'd like is for him to express a concept to you that is unexpressable? Would you like a perpetual motion machine and fries with that?
The point isn't that it is impossible to come up with new concepts (or unexpressable ones), just that's it is much harder. In our heads, we usually tend to think using the words and grammar of our language.
For example, I might think "If I buy the BMW I'll have to hold off on buying the villa in France.". I don't think arbitrary free-form thoughts of a BMW floating around in my head and a French villa fading off into the distance.
If a concept cannot be expressed using the tools of a language, then it is unlikely it will be conceived until we break out of the framework that binds us. The old expression "think outside the box" seems to apply here. Of course you can do it, but you usually have to do it intentionally.
The idea that language affects thought is basically discredited these days.
From the time you are born to the time you die, your primary means of learning and interaction with others is through your native language. To say that the framework of that language (words, grammar, sentence structure, logical constructs, etc.) don't have a major impact on your thought processes is simply ridiculous.