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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."
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.)
Nope, the first programmer was Ada Lovelace (and if you debate me about Babbage being the first, look up the terms 'operation' and 'algorithm'). Being the daughter of Lord Byron makes her English though it should be noted that both she, Zuse, Turing, and everyone up till around the time of Fortran porgrammed in langauges different than English (mainly mathematics).
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
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
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.
From Rick Mendosa's site:
As an aside, more modern surveys of various "Eskimo" languages have found as many as 30 words for snow, but this doesn't differ all that much from English, where if you tally all the various slang terms from, for example, skiers and snowboarders, you can get a few dozen as well.
Furthermore, when you do have a language with literally hundreds of "words" for variations on a similar concept, such as the (partially humorous) list from the above link, they result from what in English we would consider compound words... For example, such counts consider "words" like wetsnow and crunchysnow as distinct.
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
Last I checked, there are no verbs or nouns in C.
Operators function as verbs.
Variables and constants function as nouns.
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.
So, the deep algorithmic aspects of Sanskrit actually have more to do with Panini himself than with a feature of natural language. Ie. those algorithmic aspects are in a way there because Panini wanted them to be, not because they were there in the actual spoken Prakrit.
Last, but not least, the works of Panini should be a mandatory read not only by linguists, but by all people who in one form or another works in the field of philosophy and logic.
Neverminding the fact that Sanskrit is the direct descendant of the language (Proto Indo-European) from which the "western" languages descended. So asserting superiority is kind of umm... ridiculous.
Yes, Sanskrit is a more complex language - more declensions, conjugations. Richer vocabulary, devnagari, the ability to form more complex language forms.
Sanskrit is "superior" in the same way to Latin, as Latin is "superior" to English. (Indo-European) Languages have grown less complex over time. Its quite an interesting trend.
Of course, this all seems rather like an attempt by Indians to tout superiority over "the West." Lame. Aside from individual Brahmins, no one speaks Sanskrit. Its a dead language perpetuated forth by bookworms, just like Latin, Classical/Koine Greek, and various Old-(german|norse|gaellic) langauges.