Slashdot Mirror
Extinction Of Human Languages Affects Programming?
Tanmay Kudyadi writes "An article from NewScientist.com reports that half of all human languages will have disappeared by the end of the century, as smaller societies are assimilated into national and global cultures. This may be great news if one is looking at a common standard for communication, but it dosen't help those designing the next generation of programming languages. For example, there's an extremely strong link between Panini's Grammar and computer science (PDF link), and with every language lost, there is a possibility that we may have missed an opportunity at improving the underlying heuristics."
Well.. that dashes all hope I had for finding a papyrus re-issue of "Babylonian C for Dummies". It's been out of print for millennia.
Trolling is a art,
At the end of the day, the computer understands binary and that's it. In fact, languages are only a means for the human to talk to the computer. After a compile all the way down to the processor, the computer still only cares about two words: ZERO and ONE.
Just because a language goes extinct doesn't mean we lost an opportunity to develop better heuristics. It just means some programmers will lose touch with programing.
Currently, programing languages are based around english because the first programmers were english. If programing goes chinese, the only thing that will change is uni-lingual anglophones not understanding what is going on.
Of course this may change with biotechnology, but our current technology is still electric and i don't think it matters here.
In 200 years, There'll be 637 different words for "bug" in the our universal spoken language, ESPERA~1. To express confusion, a speaker will slap his hands over his face, stand stock still, shout "BLUE!", and wait for the other person to walk away.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Hmm, that's doubleplus ungood...
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
Human languages dying may be a pity (or not), but it does not have anything to do with computer programming.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
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...
- - Sha la la la . . .
...strong link between Panini's Grammar and computer science
I knew sandwiches were related to programming!
How exactly is C or Pascal based off a spoken language?
....
while (alive)
while (lust && !state(HUNGER)) {
seek_women(HIGH_PRIORITY);
if (found) {
sex_up(BYPAIRS)
sleep();
} else {
sex_up(MANUALLY);
watch(CARTOONS);
}
}
if (state(HUNGER))
{
seek_food();
if (found) {
chow_down_like_no_tommorow();
} else {
slaughter(NEIGHBOUR);
chow_down_like_is_tommorow();
}
}
}
Oh I get it
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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.
"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.)
On the plus side, there are new languages showing up all the time. Klingon, Vulcan, Romulan, Cardassian ....
Imagine the programming possibilities!!!
Great civilizations have lived and died on false theories. Don't mess up mine with a few facts.
Honestly, I've never seen such stuff in a well reputated journal. Programming languages are something that must be understood by computers - besides humans.
If you want a "natural" language for computers then it would have to be necessarily of Chomsky-0 type. Thus Turing-complete. And therefore not decidable which implies that a computer cannot parse it.
The author fails to realize that human languages are completely different from programming languages. Furthermore his main point is frankly rubbish: it's well known that the grammar for all human languages follows the same basic rules (Chomsky's hypothesis) thus nothing would be lost when old languages die out. Additionally it has been proven that new languages are created all the time.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
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.
I get the feeling that Klingon will end up being better preserved than at least half the languages that could potentially disappear.
As long as PASCAL, COBOL, and C++ are extinct too, I don't care.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Me extinct English? That's unpossible.
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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
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).
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
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
People who speak different languages, *think differently*.
Tables and chairs have gender? WTF? Yes they do in other languages. Reverse Polish Notation, is that backwards or what? But you get the picture, people from different cultures and especially languages think differently, different algorithms and structures come more naturally.
It isn't just programming languages which will lose out when English takes over the world, it's much more fundamental than that, some thoughts, concepts will be easier, some will be harder, maybe even impossible to formulate simply because of the language.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
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
Any questions?
To be blunt: No they don't.
Language does influence thought, simply because people will try to understand something in a way that makes sense from the perspective of their language... But the language won't fundamentally limit their thoughts. I'm sure you can think of times when you had an idea or an emotion that you lacked words for; if the claim in your post was true, you would not be capable of such thoughts.
Do you really, truly believe that somebody can be colorblind just because they don't have color words more specific than "dark" and "light?"
Language makes for a convenient labeling system, but it doesn't define your thoughts. Now somebody mod up the siblings to this post so that their useful content can be read as conveniently as the parent.....
Tables and chairs may be assigned grammatical bins, and these bins can be the same as those assigned to human genders (cf: "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things", George Lakoff), but it does not mean that French people actually think that a table has anything conceptually in common with a woman, besides the pronoun used to replace it/her. (Or a man, I can't remember my French.)
There is something important lost when the speakers of a language die, yes. But what is lost is not any concept, pattern of thought, or way of looking at the world. Because there is no concept that you cannot translate across the language barrier. There is a word in Russian, I've heard, for that feeling you get when your ex walks into the room. But just because there is no word for it in English doesn't mean that I couldn't just explain it to you. Just because some Native American languages do not have the same adverbs for time that English does doesn't mean that speakers of those languages have no concept of time.
That line of logic was presented by a linguist named Benjamin Whorf in the first half of the 20th century, and has been discredited by all modern serious linguists.
There is a "mentalese" that precedes and is fundamental to language. Babies have it. Animals have it to varying degrees. It's, yknow, nice for English speakers to presume that the exotic qualities of other languages means that their speakers have equally exotic mental structures. But they think, by and large, exactly the same as "us".
Intelligent Design: because MATH is HARD.
Brian Connors has written a programming language based on the Klingon language.
The var'aq page.
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
It's one thing to see languages die in countries where ceratin languages are forbidden, but in free nations where anyone can speak any language they want, it is irresponsible for an ethnic group to let the language and any other customs die. Watch "Whale Rider" for a modern tale of the New Zealand Maori trying to preserve their heritage. When a people lets their native customs die in favor of another set of customs, those customs really died a longer time ago than they suspect. Only resuming a strong identity is going to salvage the culture.
It all comes down to taking the time for the things that really matter in life. If a people cherish the Internet and pagers and other modern things more than the things of old then they have made a choice (concious or unconcious) to let the old ways slip into the eternal night. That is why I like to see locale options available for open source projects; the more that these are encouraged, the more lanaguages that can be saved. Countries like China that are taking an aggressive stance against Microsoft and Western commercial software are not just trying to keep from paying licenses, but also saving their culture from becoming english-saturated. If they also push locale options, then there will be plenty of rugged alternatives soon. Without alternate language construction examples, computing languages will likewise mainstream into similar styles.
Don't get me started about immigrants dumping their own native names for "Tony", "George" and the like when they come into the U.S. A name like "Panseur" (made it up) is just as valid a name.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
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.
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
Suddenly, in my library I have a print of Panjali's Mahabhasya, which is an ancient commentary to fragment of Panini's excelent grammar of sanskrit. It contains original text of Panini's, which begins with a verse:
Atha sabdaanusaasanam.
which interprets and translates (by me):
atha sabda anu-sa-asanam
here-topic (is) sound detail-layout
Of course, this grammar and semantics theory of the human (and godly) language predates many centuries our western cybernetics theoreticians of the XX. Sanskrit grammar was formally canonized by Panini as well as today's standards of computer coding languages. No other human language before esperanto and modern programing languages was result of such scientific effort.
Some 20 years ago, it was not a surprise for me, being a programmer and yogi adept at the same time, that the world is "programable" by language. Old magicians and siddhas of ancient times knew the "keywords", even today called "mantras" which enabled to operate the universe itself.
IT IS THE LANGUAGE WHICH CREATES A REALITY.
Because it is the same language which operates a mind. And we should ourselves made some effort to operate both of them correctly.
There you are, staring at me again.
Well I'm not a linguist but a programming language isnt a process of thought - it is a process of communication and that means you need both the grammatical constructs and vocabulary to express the concepts involved.
Vocabulary seems less of a problem - lots of languages have words that are sentences to explain in others (hiraeth, zeitgeist etc) but I guess thats no different to a perl programmer and a C programmer arguing about regexp processing. Clearly you can also disambiguate damage ("I had a sandwich") [did you own it or eat it ?] doesn't cause a problem in English even though its ambiguous
In some ways we know the language and mathematics itself limit the computer - there are things mathematics cannot express for one.
There are also more fundamental concepts you have to have (passive/active, third party viewpoints, what-if, condition/action, past/present/future/habitual/. and stuff like negation and question words) but I would assume all language has those.
The thing that makes me most sceptical is that I've heard many asian speakers say they think differently in English, and there is also some brain scan evidence of different activity areas. But I don't speak any asian languages and I'm not likely to be learning Mandarin or Cantonese just to find out 8)
Likewise all high level computer programming languages tend to have things they cannot directly express. Fortran for example has no way to express "fiddle with CPU register foo"
Alan
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.
To be blunt: No they don't.
As someone who is fluent in three languages, I'd have to say that yes, they do. I sometimes sub-vocalize in different languages when I'm trying to things through. However, I don't think it's an absolute law; it's just that certain concepts are easier in some languages than others. Try translating "ombudsman" from Swedish. Oh wait, in English it's "ombudsman"... why?
Simply put, different languages make it harder or easier to express certain concepts, and I suspect that it follows that those who speak only one language will have their thought patterns affected by this.
There is a much better example of how language affects thought, and one that I have yet to see a linguist mention: mathematics. Take general relativity and tensor algebra. Einstein spent most of the time between his publishing Special relativity and General simply learning a new mathematical language, one that was better suited to expressing the concepts in his theory. The same sort of thing happened in the development of quantum mechanics (bra-kets anyone?) or even calculus (differential notation).
Language may only be a tool for expressing an underlying thought, but as the saying goes "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
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.