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

Hard To Believe

[monstroyer]

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.

Re:Hard To Believe

[Manax]

You are entirely missing the point.

The idea is that other languages embody higher-order logics that we haven't yet discovered in western cultures. Consequently, when a language is lost, we've lost another opportunity to learn those logics and apply them to programming.

Now, personally, I find the idea silly. The paper that is linked from the article is pretty deep, and talking about Sanskrit particularly, which has a long history, and a lot of deep algorithmic aspects. Most of the languages that are disappearing are tiny languages, which may be interesting in their own right, but probably wouldn't revolutionize programming...

Also personally, it's too bad that these languages are disappearing, if in fact they are. However, I'm all in favor of languages becoming unused. Culling the herd and all that... but each language is a piece of our culture, and I'd personally like them to be archived, so that in a hundred years, we can use our holodecks to recreate a civilization that has been gone for a thousand years, complete with clothing, hair styles, technology and language. :) But that's just me.

In related news:

[Krapangor]

NewScientist renames NewCrackpot

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.

Language and Computer Science

[Yoda2]

Research on human language and computer science are heavily intertwined. Love or hate Chomsky, his work in linguistics paved the way for modern programming languages. Anyone who has taken a theory of computation class will be familiar with this. The flip side is that the the leaps made in defining and constructing compilers for programming languages have provided linguistics with a whole new rigor and set of tools previously unavailable.

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.

Re:Language and Computer Science

[iabervon]

As far as I can tell from studying linguistics and computer science, formal grammars are not particularly good ways of representing either sort of language. Chomsky's main founding point was that formal methods could be used to study natural language; he proposed context-free grammars, and then quickly abandoned them, because no language is actually context-free.

Computer language syntax picked up context-free grammars, because computer languages are generally context-free, at least to a certain extent. Of course, you can't actually implement an arbitrary context-free grammar efficiently, so they turned to a restricted subset which is sufficient for the important cases. Of course, the grammar is (as natural languages discovered millenia ago) insufficient for anything useful, so they developed interesting semantics behind the overly-strict grammar.

At this point, the interesting work in linguistics (which relies heavily on obscure languages to test the boundaries of what the human language faculty produces) is in the ways that language goes beyond what is feasible to define and use in an unambiguous way; this is stuff which is unsuitable for programming languages, because it is, by definition, impossible to interpret predictably. Compiler and computer language design has not informed linguistics significantly, because natural language uses an entirely different set of tricks for an entirely different set of goals.

The research in computer languages, on the other hand, is in bits of semantics which are entirely unlike any semantics used by natural languages, but are understandable by other faculties. It is focused on the formal representation of data structures and processes, two things that natural language is entirely inadaquate for and relies entirely on extra-linguistic methods (such as demonstration) to convey.

Consider, for example, the addition of a simple bit of natural language to a computer language. Say there were an "it" keyword, which referred to the most recently used variable which type checks in the context in which it is used, except that in the arguments of a method, it cannot refer to the object on which the method is called. Such a keyword would be practically impossible to use reasonably, since it would be extremely fragile and hard to interpret. However, such a keyword is present and its use is required in almost all natural languages. Natural language is really more like a machine language than a high-level programming language; the machine it is for is to be found about your left ear, and it has only been partially reverse engineered.

Tragic, but not for CS

[Tremblay99]

It's tragic that we're losing one of our deepest links to the past.

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.

Re:English is the world language (maybe)

[ackthpt]

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.

And which 'english' with that be?

The US Southern Drawl

The US Northern US 'Ya sure ya betcha'

The Queen's

The commoners

The Aussie

The Canadian, eh!

Those of us who like to say 'virii' and are relentlessly persecuted by fascist AC's

Valley Girl

etc.

I think the whole thing is a myth, languages may be going away, but as language is dynamic, new dialects or variations appear and will continue to diverge. For the most part we have some idea what the other is saying, but as new meanings or words come out of a small population and someone doesn't understand it, you still have the very mechanics which created all the languages in the first place.

Language is Cognition also

[dubStylee]

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.

Re:Does it matter?

[kfg]

Actually, we don't have a record of most of them, but yes, very, very few people spoke them. That's one of the reasons we don't have a record of them.

Most of the languages being lost are from New Guinea, which due to the peculiarities of the geography accounts for about 1/4 of all human languages. As tribal isolation is lost the tribal languages die.

Their loss is of grave concern to linguists, since, as above, they don't even have a record of most of them, but I don't see how this could effect programing languages in any way.

In fact, it's difficult to see how it effects humanity in general in any way.

KFG

Re:Humbug

[__past__]

Indeed. Behold the SBCL advocacy haiku:

(unless (equalp
(lisp-implementation-type)
"SBCL") (quit))

(How the fuck do you properly indent code in ./??)

I agree that some programs have a quality that is somewhat close to literature, but maybe not poetry. In particular, I agree with Richard Garbiel that there should be a Master of Fine Arts in Software.

I still claim that software is a discipline of its own, and natural languages and its literature are only very loosely related to it.

Var'aq, the Klingon Programming Language

[monk]

Brian Connors has written a programming language based on the Klingon language.
The var'aq page.

First Programmer

[Alan Cox]

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

Sanskrit was an artifical language itself

[Maljin Jolt]

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.

Re:Take it from a highly trained ninja linguist...

[Alan Cox]

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

Re:Take it from a highly trained ninja linguist...

[RayBender]

People who speak different languages, *think differently*.

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."