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."

Comments

Re:Hard To Believe

[Bendebecker]

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).

Tolkien Would Say "Damn Shame"

[Anonymous Coward]

J. R. R. Tolkien would have been quite unhappy to discover that obcure languages were going extinct. Near the end of 1943, English newspapers carried a story about a Harvard-developed basic English that some said should be taught to the whole world. In a December 9, 1943 letter to his son Christopher, Tolkien reacted to the news:

Col. Knox [Collie Knox, a popular journalist] says 1/8 of the world's population speaks 'English,' and that is the biggest language group. If true, damn shame--say I. May the curse of Babel strike all their tongues till they can only say 'baa baa.' It would mean much the same. I think I shall have to refuse to speak anything but Old Mercian.

Tolkien wasn't always that irritable. The strain of living in wartime England heavily burdened with responsibilities as both a professor and a member of the Home Guard left him very tired. That said, Tolkien was a long-time opponent of cultural and linguistic assimulation of the sort the AAAS speaker was describing. One result of his attitude is the incredible richess of life in his Middle-earth.

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

You have got it ass backwards

[MonkeyBoyo]

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.

You have got it backwards. A linguist will describe different languages with the same rule mechanisms. How else can you compare languages? Many different linguists have come up with many different rule systems.

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.