If I say "She berated his ideas" You can get lots of different mental pictures. This is the inherent ambiguity of all natural languages. When I hear people talk about unambiguous languages I laugh cause people always bring baggage to the table but what Pinker was saying I believe is more like all people think in similar ways fundamentally and more importantly the specific language someone uses doesn't hinder expressing ideas. You might have to coin new words but all languages are equally expressive. The reason for this is the children demand it but that's another story.
Also I saw another poster say modern languages are simpler than old ones. This is false they're just different. (to be was regular in Proto-Indo-european for instance)
Back on the topic of computer languages I think they might look different if inspired by other languages but math notation also had a hand in things (3 + 5 not 3 5 +) but then we have lisp so I don't think natural language prevented us from over turning every rock either. (or maybe the inventor of lisp spoke welsh or some other VSO language)
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If I say "She berated his ideas" You can get lots of different mental pictures. This is the inherent ambiguity of all natural languages. When I hear people talk about unambiguous languages I laugh cause people always bring baggage to the table but what Pinker was saying I believe is more like all people think in similar ways fundamentally and more importantly the specific language someone uses doesn't hinder expressing ideas. You might have to coin new words but all languages are equally expressive. The reason for this is the children demand it but that's another story.
Also I saw another poster say modern languages are simpler than old ones. This is false they're just different. (to be was regular in Proto-Indo-european for instance)
Back on the topic of computer languages I think they might look different if inspired by other languages but math notation also had a hand in things (3 + 5 not 3 5 +) but then we have lisp so I don't think natural language prevented us from over turning every rock either. (or maybe the inventor of lisp spoke welsh or some other VSO language)