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

This ruins my day.

[grub]

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.

Re:This ruins my day.

[CyberSp00k]

Babylonian C was a hardware language, silly. It was produced on clay tablets. No one is ever going to trust anything that matters to papyrus.

Re:This ruins my day.

[jasoncart]

Try archive.org or the Google cache.

Re:This ruins my day.

[dankney]

Have you checked eBay?

Re:This ruins my day.

[ackthpt]

Babylonian C was a hardware language, silly. It was produced on clay tablets

Cuneiform is awl write!

Re:This ruins my day.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:This ruins my day.

[cstangle]

Clay tablets, by the way, were where the difference between a hacker and a cracker first arose. A hacker was a skillful carver of tablets, whereas a cracker was only able to do damage and destroy whatever he touched. :D

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.

Re:Hard To Believe

[AoT]

The differences could come in syntax. Imagine if there were a language out there which had a natural syntax structure that was ideal for AI or patern recognition programs.

I think linguistic and Computer science could, and some would argue should, be much more intertwined.

Re:Hard To Believe

[mveloso]

They're not based on english, really:

for (etude=1; etude GRANDE_FRAB; etude++)
{
va_sub(etude, FRIES);
}

is valid. Keywords are just keywords, and if you really wanted to you could use macros to replace them with arbitrary words in your language of choice.

It's more accurate to say that programming languages are linear (or tend to be), because that's how computers work today. What a non-linear language would be is unclear - for the same reasons an OODL is unclear until you find problems where it's ideal.

Re:Hard To Believe

[Acidic_Diarrhea]

I think you missed the entire point. And it's not even as though you had to read the article. The write-up did a nice job of summarizing the reason why people should care about the loss of a human language. Human language structure can give insight into the structure of created languages that may work better for certain tasks.

And to correct you, the computer does not "care" about anything. Zeroes and ones are what a processor interprets in order to execute an instruction but there's no reason you could not move to a 0,1 and 2 numbering system. Maybe the introduction to computer science class that you're taking hasn't covered this idea yet.

Language design benefits from having many different languages to examine. That's what this article is about. Take your binary elsewhere.

Re:Hard To Believe

[somethinghollow]

Right now, as monstroyer said, programming languages are (at least) predominatly english. If you search google for answers to some programming question you may have, you'll see everything from German to French to Russian all using English commands, etc. It makes me wonder why localized version of languages weren't made. Since variable names only care about consistancy, I can call a variable whatever, but the commands themselves are still English or English based. So, if we all fall into an English standard, would we move away from English if, as was suggested, these Chineese became the primary progammers?

Yet, some commands are abbreviated and criptic to deflate. They aren't real English, that is. But no one complains.

It seems like we have two different "concepts." A localized semantic approach or a cryptic set of letters that we still understand because we know what the command does.

If English, etc. goes away, English commands would still be viable, since we know what the command does (e.g. I may know what Exp stands for, but I know what it does). Or, we can keep updating languages to be local to whatever vernacular.

To me, neither seems more or less desierable or usable as long as week keep traditional commands.

Either way, I don't think we will lose touch with programming; we only lose touch with certain programming languages, and that is only a mild possibility, since I'm sure there are quite a few uni-lingual non-anglophones that write in very English languages, like VB, and make it along quite well.

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).

Re:Hard To Believe

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

At the end of the day, the computer understands a two-symbol alphabet: ZERO and ONE. It understands a variety of 'words' and other contructs formed in that alphabet. That language is typically referred to as the "instruction set".

Re:Hard To Believe

[Cyram]

While I agree with your overall point about ones and zeroes having little in relation to dying languages, I disagree with the idea that this doesn't matter at all in terms of computer languages. The idea here is that some way of organizing an idea in a spoken language could help organize an idea in a computer language.

Computer languages have evolved constantly. Assembly, C, Java, etc all are ways to represent zeroes and ones to the programmer essentially, but they all organize it differently. I believe that most computer languages today that aren't zeroes and ones directly developed with an English speaker in mind. How do you know for certain that a programming language using Chinese characters, for instance, won't prove more efficient? Especially for Chinese speakers. I don't consider Chinese a dying language by any means, but it offers a different structuring of ideas. Dying languages might also offer a different way to represent things you can do with zeroes and ones. I have no idea myself without studying these languages themselves.

So, while I do sort-of agree with your point, I don't think you should completely count out the usefulness of obscure languages out when talking about computer programming languages.

Just trying to offer a counterpoint.

Re:Hard To Believe

[Anonymous Coward]

No verbs in C? Apart from break, goto...
No nouns? Apart from int, float...

Re:Hard To Believe

[somethinghollow]

Try Visual Basic. For an example with verbs:

do while not [some condition]
[some code]
loop

Besides, he said BASED on English. Languages are, it seems to me, shorthand for English.

Re:Hard To Believe

[ackthpt]

Fer ah=1 ta 5
ya'll gosub thingamajig(ah)
iffen error then goto goldangit
next ah

Re:Hard To Believe

[Bendebecker]

You want to get nit-picky? The real answer is: do they fall wihin two ranges of voltages (lets say 1-2mv or 4-5 mv.) There is no on/off. Simply, how much electricity is flowing through the circuit. At the very lowest levels almost all digital computers are analog.

Re:Hard To Believe

[Tony-A]

Last I checked, there are no verbs or nouns in C.

Operators function as verbs.
Variables and constants function as nouns.

Re:Hard To Believe

[Zeinfeld]

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).

According to the author of 'The Difference Engine' this is a major overstatement. Ada was certainly familliar with some of the capabilities of the machine but since it was never built during her lifetime it would be an exageration to call her a programmer.

All of Babbage's machines were described in a high level algebraic notation, but there was no attempt to use anything that resembled a human language. That did not come until FORTRAN.

The initial premise of this thread, that human languages are the best model for computer languages has been considered false by most people working in language design for at least 20 years.

The only notable connection between linguistics and program language design was in the mid 70s when Chomsky's theory of grammars became fashionable. The idea that computer science benefits from knowledge of human languages kinda fails when you find out that Chomsky only speaks English.

Using LR(1) grammars for program languages is not a great idea. They give you lots of power - far too much. The power of XML comes from having an ultra-simplistic grammar that can be easily coded through recursive descent.

Human language has far too much ambiguity to be useful as a model for computer languages. And computer languages that were designed arround the power of yacc were rarely very successful. The trend has actually been the reverse, languages such as Java and C# are considered superior because they have dropped the idiosyncratic features that became fashionable in the 70s.

The news that half the worlds languages are scheduled for 'end of life' by the end of the century is disappointing, I would hope we could reach at least 80%.

Take Welsh for example. Once on its way to extinction. Then folk start saying that its their heritage, must be preserved and such. Then folk start saying that the kids should be forced to learn Welsh in schools. Then folk start burning down the houses of people who speak English.

The problem with liberalism taken to extremes. is that you end up having to defend the right of others to be intollerant. I don't mind people speaking another language, its when folk start trying to impose their cultural values through the law that I object.

Re:Hard To Believe

[aulendil]

Sanskrit (or rather samskrta) means "ordered". Ordered because the works of the great grammarians Panini et al. actually was the genesis of Sanskrit.

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.

Re:Hard To Believe

[wayland]

> The problem with liberalism taken to extremes. is that you end up having to defend the right of others to be intollerant.

The question is, as always, "What do we choose to be tolerant of". Most people these days base their choice on the ancient Wiccan saying "An it harm none, do as ye will" (ie. it's OK if it doesn't hurt anyone). The difference between myself and most other people comes in the definitions of "harm" and "anyone". For example, I include God in the anyone, and most other people don't. Some of the things I think harm other people aren't seen that way by others. Who makes the choices?

Any law made implicitly imposes cultural values. For example, in some cultures, vigilante justice is the norm and acceptable. I'm sure you can all think of practises around the world ("cultural values") which we would not allow in Western countries (cultural values imposed by law).

These are interesting questions, to which I don't have the answers, although I think I tend to lean towards right-wing libertarianism (or more likely, middle-wing libertarianism :) ).

Re:Hard To Believe

[operagost]

Most people these days base their choice on the ancient Wiccan saying "An it harm none, do as ye will" (ie. it's OK if it doesn't hurt anyone).

In the time frame of the Wiccan religion, what's "ancient"? 1925?

Re:Hard To Believe

[E_elven]

Except for Perl, which is cuneiform for Gibberish.

Re:Hard To Believe

[E_elven]

We're really not missing much because of languages; a traditional language is more of a regional catastrophe than any organized, logical attempt at describing things.

Re:Hard To Believe

[Mad Marlin]

Last I checked, there are no verbs or nouns in C.

Operators function as verbs. Variables and constants function as nouns.

I won't be happy with any programming language until I can split an infinitive in it.

Re:Hard To Believe

[0x1337]

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.

Re:Hard To Believe

[DarkGreenNight]

O yes, lets kill all the languages, keep one, whichever, doesn't matter. Because everything can be explained in every language. It doesn't matter that eskimo has tenths of words that essentially mean snow, but are applied to different types of snow.

Languages were grown to suit best the needs of their speakers, if we lose one language we lose a little bit of history, things that we'll never discover again. If you are one of those who think ancient discoveries aren't worth it think about all the wonder drugs extracted from the amazonian fruits. Possibly a shaman knew about some of them, but nobody asked, or nobody could.

If a plant name's aproximate translation would be "remove big ugly nasty thing in body" it's because of something.

Now about imposing. If I went to America I would have to learn english (not that it would be hard now). If you come to Spain you'll have to learn spanish. And if you came to Catalonia it would be nice if you at least learned to understand catalan. I don't mind if you speak or not. But letting me speak my language in my land while you are a resident in it would be fair.

I'm sick of all the people defending the extermination of cultures, because that is what you're doing. If you don't want to help them don't do it, but don't hinder them.

About the Difference Engine... isn't that a fiction work by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling? And if I recall it correctly the diference engine was never built because it was not possible with the tecnology at that time.

But that doesn't mean Ada could not program. There are already some quantic computer's program, but there is no quantic computer build yet. The chicken has come before the egg.

Re:Hard To Believe

[EvilTwinSkippy]

To boldly code what no man has coded before...

Re:Hard To Believe

[DukeyToo]

I too find the idea silly. Computing languages are a way of communicating intent to a computer. Compared to a natural language, they are a very small subset in terms of functionality.

If I have a stupid servant who speaks very little english, and I want him to wash my car, it is easy enough for me to communicate that to him through hand signals and some commonly understood words. That is the same as what I do when I program a computer. It is primitive, but it works. It would not help in the least for me to learn Sanskrit.

Obviously there is a lot of room for improvement in computer languages, and it is natural for us to look under boulders. However, it seems unlikely to me that some mysterious higher order logic becomes obvious through knowledge of another language.

Re:Hard To Believe

[RevMike]

Nit-picky? Hahaha, I like it.

It's really much less to do with how much electricity is flowing through the circuit, and more about the potential at a given point. Of course currents flow, both leakage and when a gate changes state, but you will never understand the logic if you think in terms of currents rather than voltages.

If we are going to pick nits, lets really pick them.

While potential based digital circuits are likely more common, current oriented circuits do exist. Back in the olden days of yore, "current loop" was a common serial data protocol, until RS-232 became dominant for most applications. Google for "current loop" serial for some examples of digital current oriented interfaces.

You're looking at it the wrong way

[American AC in Paris]

The way I see it, programming languages of the future aren't going to evolve from spoken language. Instead, the spoken languages of the future will evolve from programming languages.

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.

Re:You're looking at it the wrong way

[prockcore]

Instead, the spoken languages of the future will evolve from programming languages.

I->do(this, already);
I=ahead(the_curve);

Re:You're looking at it the wrong way

[stefanlasiewski]

shout "BLUE!"

I think you mean scream BLUE, as in the "Blue scream of Death".

Re:You're looking at it the wrong way

[FleaPlus]

The way I see it, programming languages of the future aren't going to evolve from spoken language. Instead, the spoken languages of the future will evolve from programming languages.

Actually, a girl I occasionally swing dance with is doing a senior thesis for her English degree studying how the way people structure English language has changed since the advent of programming languages. Basically, she's looking at things like whether or not people have begun using things like conditional statements more often in English. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how much she has so far -- she tends to change the topic whenever I bring it up.

English is the world language (maybe)

[Saint Stephen]

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).

Re:English is the world language (maybe)

[Nexus Seven]

You didn't happen to be visiting England did you?

Re:English is the world language (maybe)

[Glenda Slagg]

and coming from Europe, when I went to East LA nobody was speaking English...

It will become even more of a Lingua Franca, sure but Primary for everybody, I don't think so. Peoples' pride in their own cultures would not allow it...

Re:English is the world language (maybe)

[Tremblay99]

There are over 1 billion native speakers of either Cantonese or Mandarin. English might be spoken by a billion people, but it's unlikely that it's a first language of that many people. Just a thought.

Re:English is the world language (maybe)

[CyberSp00k]

And, of course, Lingua Franca came from the time when French was the world language ... the more things change ...

Re:English is the world language (maybe)

[PacoTaco]

I think we'll speak what the people with the guns and the money speak. Maybe we'll end up with English and Chinese, like Firefly.

Re:English is the world language (maybe)

[Joey7F]

but I think that within 100 years English will be the primary language of everybody.

I agree, but it won't be the English that we speak

--Joey

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.

Re:English is the world language (maybe)

[Bendebecker]

Personally I am still expecting Latin to make a huge comeback...

Re:English is the world language (maybe)

[El]

Agreed; English is the second language of a majority of the people in the world, not the first. But I'm willing to bet that there are Cantonese and Mandarin speakers that find it easier to communicate with each other using English than their widely differing dialects.

Re:English is the world language (maybe)

[Srin Tuar]

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.

Global communication is killing language specialization. Youll notice that those variations is US english are simply relics from before the era of mass broadcasting. Even now, they are fading.

Language diversity is a function of population isolation. Language evolution over time is inversely proportional to population pool sizes.

In an era where we are approaching global pervasive communication, language diversification is going backwards and language evolution is slowing down in favor of language unification and cross-pollination.

New pressures will continue to change language and how we communicate, but the vast diversity of languages you see today wouldnt evolve under modern conditions.

Re:English is the world language (maybe)

[jefe7777]

mod parent up!

i just spent a weekend some good friends of mine, who are married.

The guy speaks cantonese, and the girl speaks mandarin. It's very interesting! They speak to each other using english, but when they speak to their respective parents, they use their native tongue. It's comforting to stand there and have one look as clueless as me, when the other is speaking their native language.

we watched Shaolin Soccer the other day as well, and one had to read the subtitles, while the other watched the movie normally! (I believe Shaolin Soccer is in cantonese...iirc)

anyway...i have a feeling that 300 years from now, english and mandarin will be the dominant languages.

Re:English is the world language (maybe)

[dcobbler]

This is the best part:

But just as many minority languages are dying out, the languages that dominate the globe, such as Chinese, English and Spanish, are becoming increasingly varied and complex, says David Lightfoot, a language researcher at Georgetown University. And new languages may even spring up. For example, new versions of Chinese are likely to emerge that cannot be understood by some other Chinese speakers.

Not only that. There are already a whole bunch of different versions of Chinese languages that can't be understood by each other.

And I think English is fracturing into different versions that will, increasingly, be "foreign" to each other.

Maybe there will many fewer languages in the world in a few centuries, but I don't think there will ever be just one.

- dcobbler: the world needs another blog: www.digitalcobbler.com/blog

Re:English is the world language (maybe)

[CyberSp00k]

My bad.

"lingua franca ... [It, lit., Frankish language] 1: a common language that consists of Italian mixed with French, Spanish, Greek, and Arabic and is spoken in the ports of the Mediterranean" Webster's Third New International Dictionary.

It's a wasted day when you don't something new or learn that something you knew wasn't correct.

However, French was the language of diplomacy (a world language) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Re:English is the world language (maybe)

[Zeinfeld]

the only reason it became the international language of deplomacy was because the end of WW I and the legue of nations occured there. the Olympics uses it because a French man was the one who founded the modern Olympic games.

Cause and effect backwards here. French became the language of diplomacy in the mid 17th century as protestant countries tended to largely abandon the use of Latin. The problem was that most of the available Latin interpreters were Catholic priests, and these were not generally considered trustworthy by Protestant monarchs. French was the language of commerce, it made sense to use it for diplomatic negotiations.

It was the rise of the British empire in the 19th century that laid the ground for French being replaced. Half the world was ruled from London. When the US began to become an industrial power after the civil war the position of English was strengthened.

By the time the league of nations was formed the French were already becomming worried that French was a second class language.

Re:English is the world language (maybe)

[b00fhead]

Too right mate! That's why us blokes still speak Strine. Crikey!

Re:English is the world language (maybe)

[unother]

If he was able to understand the English that was spoken, he was most likely in Scandinavia.

What a buncha baloney!

[FortKnox]

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.

Re:What a buncha baloney!

[S.Lemmon]

This I think is the real problem. By the end of the day what counts is that a language be fairly easy to learn, use, and able to do what you need. Having some academic idea of lexical perfection really benefits no one but the professors applying for grant money. Indeed, the whole idea of a "perfect" language may be a bit of an illusion to begin with.

I think it's why simple but messy languages like Perl continue to be more popular than stuff like lisp. Just as in the real world none of the many "ideal" spoken/written languages developed by academia have ever really won out over the lexical hodge-podge of traditional languages.

Personally, I have trouble trusting any language where it's developers spend more time talking about the language syntax than they do talking about the project they're actually working on. To me, it's a sign the language's complexity may be hurting development more than any of it's supposed advantages are helping. Heck, even popular languages like C++ gets dangerously close to that sometimes.

Languages disappearing??

[bckrispi]

Hmm, that's doubleplus ungood...

Re:Languages disappearing??

[TopShelf]

I'm sure others would think it very horrorshow, my good droog...

Does it matter?

[LinuxInDallas]

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...)

Re:Does it matter?

[CyberSp00k]

If we have record of that language, then I don't see how much would have been lost.

The ability to read Egyptian hieroglyphics was lost from ~400 C.E. until Napoleon lead the looters into Egypt ~1800 and one of his troops tripped over the Rosetta Stone. [I was watching the History Channel this morning.] Plenty of records of the language were lying about, but no record players.

Re:Does it matter?

[Theatetus]

But we don't have a record, in most cases. I'd say about 50% of human languages are pretty thoroughly documented. Another 30% have sketchy documentation. The final 20% are all but unknown to researchers (most of these are in New Guinea).

We really need to talk to the dying generation of New Guineans, Siberians, and Africans who speak these disappearing languages so that there will be a record, like you say. But do you have the money to send out a few thousand linguists? Me neither.

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:Does it matter?

[colmore]

I think the way this story is being discussed here reflects Slashdot's sadly narrow worldview. If it doesn't affect software engineering then it doesn't matter.

This is a wealth of poetry, folklore, and culture that is vanishing. Perhaps it's more efficient for everyone on earth to speak the languages of 3 or 4 dominant cultures, but it means that human society will be far less vibrant.

Small societies with strong senses of identity and history produce more of interest than many larger societies. Ancient Athens in the fourth century BC had a population of only aroun 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.

So yes, I'm a luddite. I think progress should always be questioned. And immediate gains in efficiency, production, and practical utility are frequently not in the long term beneficial. If all human society should aim for is production-consumption-growth then count me out, give this place back to the other animals, they were doing a much better job of sharing.

This message paid for by the society of appreciators of variety and charm over success and power. Someone find me a city-state where I can go be an olive farmer.

Re:Does it matter?

[Darken_Everseek]

Any loss of cultural diversity is a bad thing. Humans define themselves by our differences. Language is probably the foremost non-physical distinguishing characteristic a person has. Taken to an extreme, the continued loss of language could have us all speaking either mandarin or spanish (which, iirc, are the most commonly spoken languages today). Obviously, this kind of thing isn't going to happen any time in the near future, but I'd argue that the loss is still important, regardless of the magnitude.

Oh, and just to be nit-picky (sorry, it's in my nature) Things are affected, the effects are observed.

Re:Does it matter?

[Zeinfeld]

Any loss of cultural diversity is a bad thing.

I don't think that we exactly lost a great deal due to the Inca and Mayan religions being eliminated. Human sacrifice not that great an idea.

Equally the loss of the conquistador and colonial cultures was on balance a good thing.

Humans define themselves by our differences.

Some people do. Others define themselves by their achievements.

Re:Does it matter?

[Darken_Everseek]

Human sacrafice isn't high up on my list of Incan or Mayan cultural contributions. To start, the practice is by no means limited to those cultures. Also, they both had staggeringly beautiful architecture, and remarkable religions, as well.

What, by the way, is an achievement, but a difference that makes us stand out from humanity?

Humbug

[__past__]

The one thing that designers of programming languages have to accept is that programming languages do not have much to do with natural languages. No surprise - natural languages are meant to communicate with humans, computer languages are primarily (although this might be considered a bug) designed to give unanimous orders to deterministic systems. Big difference. There is no poetry in COBOL, and there is no way do completely specify an algorithm for a von-Neumann-machine in portugese.

Human languages dying may be a pity (or not), but it does not have anything to do with computer programming.

Re:Humbug

[Bendebecker]

"There is no poetry in COBOL"

I agree with you there. Nothing written in COBOL could ever be mistaken for poetry. But there is some code in langauges like Lisp that is so elegant that one can only call it poetry.

Re:Humbug

[JabberWokky]

Are you kidding? Not only is there poetry about COBOL, but it's widely known that Shakespeare invented COBOL:

"Let us ADD our INCOME to our CAPITAL, as the squirrel adds to its autumn horde. Aye, there's the SUM that makes a TOTAL WEALTH. 3000 DUCATS? Is this an EXPENDITURE I see before me? Marry 'tis best 'twere TAKEN AWAY, like as the magpie taketh away the jewel of great price. But hist! Here cometh the INTEREST, and 'tis of no mean interest, i' faith! I had lief ADD a percentage of this, than clasp my fair Rosalind's spleen."

In all reality, as many people have pointed out, there is a large chunk of poetry written in various programming languages, and the inverse is true as well; many human languages are used in forms that are human "programs". Instead of being stored on harddrives, they are published in cookbooks and engineering texts.

--
Evan

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.

Re:Humbug

[ndogg]

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

Use the <ecode> tag.

The languages that are lost

[Mycroft_514]

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.

Re:The languages that are lost

[ispeters]

Frankly I think this is BS. English didn't come prewritten with words for CD or hyperthreading. Someone made up new words and then explained them to their friends. Other languages do the same thing. There's no fundamental reason that Chinese, Kurdish, or Urdu couldn't expand to explain things like quarks or spam or anything else (assuming they haven't already, which I realise is pretty short-sighted of me). Language is a fairly spontaneous mapping of arbitrary symbols to meaning. There are no restrictions on what language can do.

There's also no reason to believe we'd ever end up with only one language. Perhaps increased mobility and ease of communication will reduce the total number of languages in use, but even in Canada or the US there are significant linguistic differences between neighbouring provinces or states, and the majority of people speak English in both countries. I would even venture to say that people from rural areas in Newfoundland speak nearly a different language than people from rural areas in Louisiana but they'd both tell you they're speaking English. Even as languages converge on each other, there are elements within each language that spin out from the centre and introduce new variations. I don't believe there's any reason to expect that to stop.

Ian

Panini?

[John Girouard]

...strong link between Panini's Grammar and computer science

I knew sandwiches were related to programming!

Re:Panini?

[KH]

For those do not know, Panini is the author of the Sanskrit grammar. I don't quite figure why the article was linked here in this context. Sanskrit was dead for a couple of millennia, but it's not like it was lost. And it's not like if Sanskrit had not been dead, we would have had a much better computer language today.

One irony is that Paninikilled the Sanskrit language. He effectively made the language rigid by describing the grammatical rules so beautifully in about 4,000 sutras. If one does not compose a Sanskrit sentence following the rules prescribed in the Astadhyayi (Panini's sutras), it was not sanskrtam (purified). Thus the language became something that keeps changing, or something that has to be learned while growing up. It officially got the status of a dead language, not that it's bad.

On the other hand, think about this: modern linguistics started after the discovery of Sanskrit, including Panini's grammar. It actually helped forming many linguistic concepts. Modern linguists helped forming computer languages. Is it a surprise that there are many things in common?

One of my teachers, who happens to be the leading scholar in the field of Sanskrit grammar, always emphasized us that one of the big misconception about the grammar of Panini is that it dictates how to compose a Sanskrit sentence. He said, it is more of a tool to analyze grammatically correct sentence. It does not know syntax. It would appear that, say, a past participle stem from the root pac- may have derived by going through several Paninian rules, but the matter of fact was that there was the form pakta long before the grammar was formed.

Those mechanisms working in Panini's grammar is amazing and the logic behind it seems indeed like computer language. Still, an article like the one linked here is not much different from trying to find something that was not originally intended to show the supremacy of one civilization. Even the commentators of the grammar emphasize that the grammar is not the first but the speech was the first.

So, stop moaning about the death of Sanskrit as a language. A techie should be grateful that it was dead as a language, but frozen and kept. No wonder India can produce so many good programmars. For some, programming is something similar to what they have been doing for a couple of thousand years. By the way, I'm not an Indian or a programmar.

Re:Panini?

[El Torico]

I agree with your post overall and I learned a bit from it, so first I want to thank you for a very good post. However, I think the last paragraph is off the mark.

No wonder India can produce so many good programmars. For some, programming is something similar to what they have been doing for a couple of thousand years.

There are a few problems with these statements, aside from the purposeful misspelling of "programmers", here.

India can produce good Programmers in the same way that any nation can, by teaching Computer Science and enforcing intellectual discipline. I don't agree that there is a cultural predisposition involved.

What do you mean by "so many"? You can't assume that India produces more good Programmers as compared to the total population than other countries. Maybe they do have a higher percentage, or maybe they just have a lot of people, period (over 1 billion).

Every culture has been using reason and mathematics for thousands of years, and mathematics is the basis of programming.

Um shutup

[tomstdenis]

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 ....

Re:Um shutup

[tomstdenis]

Deparate for what? I do real coding as well. It is people like the famous anonymous coward that really drain the usability of slashdot down. Keep it up though. You might say something funny eventually.

Tom

3,400 languages left

[Richard Allen]

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.

plausible but ease of use?

[gooru]

"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.)

Re:plausible but ease of use?

[roman_mir]

Assembler is difficult to learn? I think not. What is so difficult in manipulating memory directly, using interrupts and clock at the low level?

What you probably meant to say was that programming a complex easily maintained system in assembler is much more time consuming than it is in a high level language.

New Languages

[knarfling]

On the plus side, there are new languages showing up all the time. Klingon, Vulcan, Romulan, Cardassian .... Imagine the programming possibilities!!!

Re:New Languages

[WinterSolstice]

The true warrior does not comment his code :)

-WS

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.

Re:In related news:

[sgtsanity]

According to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis:

1. Differences in language structure will lead to different patterns of thought.
2. A speaker's native language has a serious effect on their development of world-view.

Studies (Berlin & Kay, 1969) have shown that people perceive differences in color differently based on their language, satisfying tenet 1. Tenet 2 is generally believed to be unable to be proven or disproven using methods that anyone can think of right now.

Now, differences in thought are often more evidently reflected by differences in language, for it is language that often transmits thought. For example, the Tobrianders of Papua New Guinea think and speak in a non-linear matter. While many of us have been trained since birth to connect the dots, often in books of numbered dot diagrams, they emphasize patterns over linearity. By losing this language, we also lose, to some extent, their unique pattern of thought.

Re:In related news:

[RDPIII]

If you want a "natural" language for computers then it would have to be necessarily of Chomsky-0 type.

Whoa, why would that have to be the case? People have made all sorts of arguments for some natural languages being context-free, regular, star-free, etc. In either case you can have very expressive subsets that are context-free. If natural languages could only be expressed by Type-0 grammars, then we would have a real problem explaining how humans process language.

it's well known that the grammar for all human languages follows the same basic rules (Chomsky's hypothesis)

It doesn't matter whether it's well known or not -- it's a hypothesis. (And not a particularly concrete one at that. If you don't say explicitly what the common structure of all languages is, it's pretty much devoid of content. ) But suppose you have a specific hypothesis that says something about all human languages. Then it makes sense to test it against as much data as you can get your hands on, and that includes languages that are about to become extinct.

Article doesn't mention the net...

[GPLDAN]

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.

BAH!

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Computer science will never find the perfect language. It doesn't exist. Any time you try to render an idea in a language, any language, you have to simplify it.

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?

Re:BAH!

[El]

Isn't the imperfectability of formal systems what Goebel's Theorem points out? That you can't devise a useful language in which the sentence "This sentence is false" can be correctly evaluated?

Some how...

[sofakingl]

I get the feeling that Klingon will end up being better preserved than at least half the languages that could potentially disappear.

I Don't Care

[rixstep]

As long as PASCAL, COBOL, and C++ are extinct too, I don't care.

Where did you get that idea?

[rufusdufus]

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.

misleading

[goon america]

half of all human languages will have disappeared by the end of the century

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.

Re:Evolution

[Frennzy]

with a one-bit bus (our mouth) that's going to be pretty slow.

I suppose we could add ten fingers, two eyes, and three toes to the mouth, and get a 16 bit bus, but that's going to be pretty hard to process. Not to mention it will be half duplex at best, since you'd need your eyes to see the other person communicating. Not to mention that a bit shift could very easily have you firmly planting your foot in your mouth.

Thank you. Thank you. I'll be here all week.

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

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Um, I look at C and assembler are more about moving data into and out of registers than anything else. The "rules" have more to do with 4th century algebra then 20th century linguistics. Granted, 19th century Boolean logic does contribute a bit.

Re:Language and Computer Science

[Anonymous Coward]

So, like, you don't use RECURSION when PROGRAMMING?

It's true that you can write a lot of programs without getting into grammar and language theory. (However, these programs would bore me, and a lot of other people.)

You won't get very far into computer science (or for that matter, modern logic) without getting into (stuff very related to) "20th century linguistics".

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.

Re:Language and Computer Science

[today]

>Say there were an "it" keyword

Doesn't Perl's $_ variable come close?

Real meaning is language independent

[NewIntellectual]

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.)

Snow

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Snow

[pla]

In Alaska, the Eskimos have 15 different words for snow

From Rick Mendosa's site:

The Great Inuit Vocabulary Hoax is anthropology's contribution to urban legends. It apparently started in 1911 when anthropologist Franz Boaz casually mentioned that the Inuit--he called them "Eskimos," using the derogatory term of a tribe to the south of them for eaters of raw meat--had four different words for snow. With each succeeding reference in textbooks and the popular press the number grew to sometimes as many as 400 words.

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.

Re:Snow

[Derling Whirvish]

How many words does English have for "road"? A lot more than the Eskimoes have for either "snow" or "road" I'll bet. Does that make us better than them because we can express the concept of a road "to new dimensions beyond that of some other languages"?

alley, artery, asphalt, avenue, backstreet, beltline, beltway, blacktop, boulevard, byway, circle, cobblestone, course, court, crossroad, drag, drive, driveway, expressway, interstate, highway, lane, line, loop, main drag, mainline, parkway, passage, pathway, pavement, pike, promenade, road, roadway, route, street, subway, tarmac, terrace, thoroughfare, throughway, thruway, track, trail, turnpike, viaduct, way.

Does any other language have a dictionary like the Oxford English Dictionary? The only one that comes close is the Russian Academy of Sciences 17-volume Russian dictionary. Most languages have far less words in total than English because English adds foreign words all the time. You can express subtleties in English that are impossible in other languages.

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:Tragic, but not for CS

[Anonymous Coward]

BZZT. Welsh is a Celtic and therefore Indo-European language. Thanks for playing. By the way, the Whorf-Sapir nonsense about Inuit words for snow is pretty widely discredited nowadays. If you apply the same criteria to English, you'll get similar results.

Re:Tragic, but not for CS

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, I totally agree with you.

Isn't that a Joseph Stalin famous quote ?

"Take away their language, and you'll take away their soul"

Re: Tragic, but not for CS

[Black Parrot]

> Linguistic family trees generally mirror genetic family trees.

That's not true. Consider the linguistic family tree leading up to present-day English, and then consider the genetic family tree leading up to present-day English speakers.

While there is surely a positive correlation, "mirrors" is far too strong a word.

Pedantic notes:

> 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

Welsh is an IE language.

Pro[to]-Indo-European is the reconstructed parent language for the whole family. Its children spread from India to Ireland, but PIE itself didn't.

Obligatory Simpson's

[Frennzy]

Me extinct English? That's unpossible.

languages do not disappear

[WormholeFiend]

they evolve or merge with more influential ones.

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.ht ml)

Re:languages do not disappear

[dubStylee]

Some evolve or merge into others, as you suggest, but many others actually do disappear leaving at most the names of a few geographic locations as the only part "merged" into other languages. Hundreds of American Indian languages disappeared when the populations were decimated by disease or war and the few remaining members were either separated from each other or subjected to language "re-education". I've talked to a number of American Indians who went through "re-education" (supposedly for their own benefit) in the 1950s - they got beaten or had to eat soap if they were caught speaking their own language. Languages not only disappear, they get killed off.

Re: languages do not disappear

[Black Parrot]

> they evolve or merge with more influential ones.

No, some disappear without a trace. In contact situations where one of the languages is associated with power and status, speakers of the other language will often give it up for the status language. If the number of speakers is small, the language can disappear within a few generations.

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:Language is Cognition also

[dubStylee]

...

a language that's worth anything doesn't naturally face extinction.

Um, yeah right, having 90% of the population wiped out by foreign diseases and then being put in a boarding school where you get whipped for speaking in your native tongue, those have got nothing to do with the language becoming extinct. Instead it's the language's "worth" that determines extinction. How exactly is that measured, with a "lingo-worth-o-meter"? Where can I get one?

I don't think so.

[Tumbleweed]

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.

Re:Japanese

[dancingmad]

You're not studying very well then:

There are hard and fast rule's to a word's meaning, the kanji associated with it. Because Japanese uses a sound system based on (in English) what are two syallables (a i e o u, ka ki ka ko ku) in English becomes one in Japanese (some Arabic sounds are the same and I'm sure it's the same for most other langauges - a sound considered "one" in their language is differnent sounds mixed together in ours) there are a lot of homophones in Japanese. However, the kanji always points to the correct meaning.

Words don't have different spellings. A word can be written in hiragana (phonetically) or in a combination of kanji and kana, and that's it. Words don't change spellings, because they have either their kanji or the phonetic spelling, which doesn't change.

You are right that a words meaning can be based on context - but take the phonetic word hashi for example; which can mean edge, bridge, or chopsticks - you'd be in bizarre circumstances to not understand which one is being referred to. In fact a lot of Japanese humor comes from the fact that there are so many homophones and they can so easily be punned.

You're thinking about Japanese entirely the wrong way: it's not that ONE WORD has many different meanings, it's that many words sound the same. It seems like a little thing, but that's a fundamental concept. You'll never speak a foreign language like a native if you continue to think in English terms like that.

I find Japanese to be an elegant mix of Chinese characters and a phonetic alphabet that combines the beauty and inherent simplicity of characters (if you grow up with them) and the flexibility and amalgamative qualities of a phonetic or alphabet based system. It's less unwieldy than Chinese in incoporating new words but it has the same beauty as Chinese or Arabic (which is phonetic, but Arabs put a lot of stock in calligraphy, as do the Chinese and Japanese).

Who cares, C is all we needed!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

if C was good enough for Linus, is good enough for everything else!!

One Language to rule them all...

[Quixadhal]

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?

Wrong

[imsabbel]

He devoloped a programming language called "plankalkul", which included stuff like arrays, subroutines and floating point arithmetic.

I wish

[coldtone]

cobol would become extinct.

Re:Japanese

[bombadillo]

"Seriously, I'm teaching myself Japanese now, and you have no idea how frustrating it is to learn that one word can have MANY different meanings, all based on context, and there are no hard rules as to how its used"

That sounds pretty cool... Oh wait I don't want to confuse you with words that have different meanings based on context.

You think in a language.

[Moderation abuser]

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.

Re:You think in a language.

[lawpoop]

Most modern linguists would disagree with you. Yes it's true, different langauges order their sentences differently. Japanese goes Object - Verb - Subject while English goes Subject - Verb - Object. Finnish has postpositions and English has prepositions. But the reigning idea in linguistics is that languages are 'functionally equivalent' -- that all languages are equally capable of expressing any idea that one language is capable of expressing. Now maybe an Arabian goat herder doesn't have the background to understand American Football rules, but that doesn't mean that Arabic creates a totally different thought mode in its users.

Language is not wholly dependent on technology

[DeadVulcan]

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...

I'm not convinced

[danny]

I think there are better arguments for caring about langage extinction. For a good overview, David Crystal's Language Death is a decent little book.

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.

What me worry?

[hcg50a]

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.

Re:What me worry?

[vidarh]

What I find funny in discussions like this is that people equates languages and cultures dying with homogenisation. Yes, many obscure languages die, but new language variations arise on a daily basis.

I'm 28, and I already find that there are groups of youths in London where I live that are difficult to understand when talking amongst themselves because they're creating new words and contractions all the time. In certain areas of Norway, where I'm from, I noticed a couple of years ago that many students had started adopting words from Arabic, Vietnamese and other languages used by the immigrant population, simply because many of them go to schools that are have high number of immigrants.

Languages change. Deal. Sometimes use of a language changes enough that it could be justifiably called a new language. To think that having fewer mutually incomprehensible languages means that there won't still be significant differences shows little attention to what is going on.

The same thing goes for culture. So traditions observed by some small group somewhere dies out. So what? New traditions are being created every day. New groups arise, but are often not immediately visible to us because they don't consist of strange looking natives of some far away place carrying out weird rituals - they consists of strange looking natives of your own back yard carrying out weird rituals. It might not be codified in religious texts or have been subjected to anthropological studies, but that doesn't mean it isn't a culture.

If you go out in any moderately large city and LOOK, you could likely easily spot a wide diversity of cultural phenomena that are completely alien to you, and more so than many traditions of dying cultures. They are just more hidden, because they are integrated into a culture you are used to - they may not wear strange clothes, or other visible signs, or they do, but only at special occasions. They may not speak a strange language, or they do, but it's hidden in a veneer of a language you know, and only used when speaking to eachother.

I'd challenge anyone to describe "Western culture" for instance in a way that even a dozen of slashdotter's could agree on, without reducing it to just a handful of vague statements. Any attempt at a comprehensive description would strand on account of not taking into account all the significant variations, whether in lifestyle choices, local traditions that you simply don't notice until you start living with them, language differences you don't realise until you find yourself in a situation where your way of phrasing something is utterly misunderstood, or sub-cultures you normally only see the surface of because you are not "one of them" and not included.

Where is the threat of monoculture?

I'm going to cry now

[gsdean]

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!

Priorities

[The Gline]

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.

Spelling, in Japanese and English

[DeadVulcan]

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"?)

No, but it's *everyone's* second language

[Moderation abuser]

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.

Re:No, but it's *everyone's* second language

[groomed]

As the world begins talking to one another, it turns out there's only one language they all speak.

Um, I don't think you've developed a proper appreciation of how big the world really is. Yes, English is widely used as a lingua franca. But that doesn't mean that the speech patterns of Jamaicans, East Londoners and Indians all over the world are converging. If anything, they're getting more idiosyncratic with the passage of time.

Re:No, but it's *everyone's* second language

[Banjonardo]

An interesting phenomenon, though, is how Latin language speakers speak with each other. It would be shameful to see Brazilian (Portuguese speaking) and a Mexican (Spanish) speak in English. They're just close enough. For emergency's sake, sure, but any speaker of one can get comfortable enough in the other living in the country for half a year or so, so it seems that some day we might all need a little Spanish.

Ah, Tabarnak!

[dupper]

/Unfunny, obscure attempt at Canadian political humour

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

Re:Tolkien Would Say "Damn Shame"

[ignavus]

I actually *have* taught myself a "dying" language for the sheer joy of it - Plattdeutsch - and read a number of books in it. I would recommend such a hobby to anyone interested in other languages and cultures. I think the obscurity of the language is part of the attraction - a bit like collecting rare stamps.

Some other possibilities are Faeroese (not dying, but obscure), Frisian (closely related to English), Occitan (south of France), Cornish (dead, but revived), Rumansch (Switzerland), Romnimos ("Gypsy"), Wendish/Sorbian, and the extinct Prussian language. Americans might also consider Hawaiian.

Although these languages are obscure, it is possible to find documentation on most of them, often on the web - and in major university libraries. Quite a few of these languages are also represented by small colonies of immigrants in the US.

Life cycles of languages

[yintercept]

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.

Sanskrit simplification

[theolein]

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.

linguistics and cognitive science

[ajagci]

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.

D4 P41|\| !!!

[nounderscores]

Any questions?

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

[NTiOzymandias]

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.....

You don't think in a language. You *speak* in one

[geekpuppySEA]

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".

Var'aq, the Klingon Programming Language

[monk]

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

Good! The Village Is Getting Bigger

[reallocate]

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.

Syntax error

[melquiades]

Every time I try to comprehend the parent post, I get:

ungood is not an lvalue

Some people are just so hard to understand!

the death of language in free nations

[shokk]

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.

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

[Tony-A]

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.

Re:Japanese

[owlstead]

edge, bridge, or chopsticks - you'd be in bizarre circumstances to not understand which one is being referred to

Watch out for that bridge!!!

What bridge?

AAAAAaaaaaarrrrrgggghhhh!!!

What a silly reason

[Jerf]

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.

Don't Worry

[serutan]

It wouldn't have been any use because it wasn't Y0K compliant.

Re:You don't think in a language. You *speak* in o

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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

India

[bluGill]

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)

Hindi and Urdu???

[pendsepr]

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).

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.

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

[cjellibebi]

>But the language won't fundamentally limit their thoughts.

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.

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."

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

[Adartse.Liminality]

To be blunt: No they don't.

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?.

Where does progress come from?

[solprovider]

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.

Other types of logic?

[mveloso]

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.

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

[Squiffy]

"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.

Re:You don't think in a language. You *speak* in o

[Justice8096]

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.

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

[tehanu]

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.

Algorithm

[Poligraf]

The word "algorithm" encripts the name of the first programmer - Al Gore ;-).

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

[Durendal]

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.

Re:Programming in Chinese

[mrogers]

Perhaps parallel computers could be 'programmed' with Chinese characters having the horizontal characters represent threads and the vertical arrangement of characters represent something else.

What would Chinese characters trickling down a green-phosphor screen represent?

Chinese and OOP

[stuffduff]

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?