I can't remember offhand, but a friend stayed for a few months in a certain region of Africa where the local language had no notion of vowels.
e.g. instead of saying "Fred is walking to the well" you would have to say "Fred legs up down well"
An example of a Declarative natural language? Maybe African tribesmen would have come up with Prolog or Lisp.
And, another important language issue I found was when I spent some time in Thailand... I managed to lose my phrase book a couple of times and each new one I bought had a different translation for "Yes" and "No".
I eventually found out that there really is no such thing as "Yes" and "No" in Thai! There is only reiteration of the request to confirm, or saying the request back and appending a NOT operator to it. I thought, "No binary! What the hell is going on!"
It allows the same kind of exchanges that you would expect in normal life as Yes & No allow, but is more procedural than state-based.
Actually, it's kind-of like a serial packet request-response or a checksum or somfink.
Browser: "Request Coconut Shake"
Server: "You want Coconut Shake?"
Browser: "I want Coconut Shake"
Server: "Here is Coconut Shake"
Thai also has this wacky "Politener" that ideally you should put at the end of each sentence. It changes depending on whether the speaker is male or female. Males say "Khup" and females say "Kaah". It sort of says (on every sentence!) "I'm male and I'm being polite" or "I'm female and I'm being polite". It puts you in a totally different kind of head-space saying that all the time!
This also seems to have parallels to certain serial protocols... sometimes you need to keep saying what you are to make sure that you get the right things.
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I can't remember offhand, but a friend stayed for a few months in a certain region of Africa where the local language had no notion of vowels.
An example of a Declarative natural language? Maybe African tribesmen would have come up with Prolog or Lisp.
And, another important language issue I found was when I spent some time in Thailand... I managed to lose my phrase book a couple of times and each new one I bought had a different translation for "Yes" and "No".
I eventually found out that there really is no such thing as "Yes" and "No" in Thai! There is only reiteration of the request to confirm, or saying the request back and appending a NOT operator to it. I thought, "No binary! What the hell is going on!"
It allows the same kind of exchanges that you would expect in normal life as Yes & No allow, but is more procedural than state-based.
Actually, it's kind-of like a serial packet request-response or a checksum or somfink.
Thai also has this wacky "Politener" that ideally you should put at the end of each sentence. It changes depending on whether the speaker is male or female. Males say "Khup" and females say "Kaah". It sort of says (on every sentence!) "I'm male and I'm being polite" or "I'm female and I'm being polite". It puts you in a totally different kind of head-space saying that all the time!
This also seems to have parallels to certain serial protocols... sometimes you need to keep saying what you are to make sure that you get the right things.