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."

This ruins my day.

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.

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.

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

Cuneiform is awl write!

Re:This ruins my day.

Try archive.org or the Google cache.

Re:This ruins my day.

Have you checked eBay?

Hard To Believe

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

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

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.

First Programmer

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

Algorithm

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

Re:Hard To Believe

Except for Perl, which is cuneiform for Gibberish.

Re:Hard To Believe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re:Hard To Believe

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.

You think in a language.

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.

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

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.....

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

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

Well I'm not a linguist but a programming language isnt a process of thought - it is a process of communication and that means you need both the grammatical constructs and vocabulary to express the concepts involved.

Vocabulary seems less of a problem - lots of languages have words that are sentences to explain in others (hiraeth, zeitgeist etc) but I guess thats no different to a perl programmer and a C programmer arguing about regexp processing. Clearly you can also disambiguate damage ("I had a sandwich") [did you own it or eat it ?] doesn't cause a problem in English even though its ambiguous

In some ways we know the language and mathematics itself limit the computer - there are things mathematics cannot express for one.

There are also more fundamental concepts you have to have (passive/active, third party viewpoints, what-if, condition/action, past/present/future/habitual/. and stuff like negation and question words) but I would assume all language has those.

The thing that makes me most sceptical is that I've heard many asian speakers say they think differently in English, and there is also some brain scan evidence of different activity areas. But I don't speak any asian languages and I'm not likely to be learning Mandarin or Cantonese just to find out 8)

Likewise all high level computer programming languages tend to have things they cannot directly express. Fortran for example has no way to express "fiddle with CPU register foo"

Alan

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

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:You think in a language.

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.

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

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".

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

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.

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

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.

You're looking at it the wrong way

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

shout "BLUE!"

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

Re:You're looking at it the wrong way

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.

D4 P41|\| !!!

Any questions? [megatokyo.com]

Re:English is the world language (maybe)

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

Re:English is the world language (maybe)

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)

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)

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.

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

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:English is the world language (maybe)

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)

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)

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.

What a buncha baloney!

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.

Languages disappearing??

Hmm, that's doubleplus ungood...

Syntax error

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

ungood is not an lvalue

Some people are just so hard to understand!

Does it matter?

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?

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

Humbug

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

"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

Indeed. Behold the SBCL [sourceforge.net] 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 [dreamsongs.com] that there should be a Master of Fine Arts in Software [dreamsongs.com].

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

Are you kidding? Not only is there poetry about COBOL [purdue.edu], but it's widely known that Shakespeare invented COBOL [leeds.ac.uk]:

"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

The languages that are lost

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.

Panini?

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

I knew sandwiches were related to programming!

Re:Panini?

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.

Um shutup

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

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

plausible but ease of use?

"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.)

New Languages

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

Re:New Languages

The true warrior does not comment his code :)

-WS

Var'aq, the Klingon Programming Language

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

In related news:

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.

You have got it ass backwards

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.

Article doesn't mention the net...

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!

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?

Some how...

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

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

Where did you get that idea?

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

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.

Language and Computer Science

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

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.

Real meaning is language independent

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.)

Re:Snow

In Alaska, the Eskimos have 15 different words for snow

From Rick Mendosa's site [mendosa.com]:

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.

Tragic, but not for CS

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.

Obligatory Simpson's

Me extinct English? That's unpossible.

languages do not disappear

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)

Language is Cognition also

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.

I don't think so.

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.

One Language to rule them all...

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?

I'm not convinced

I think there are better arguments for caring about langage extinction. For a good overview, David Crystal's Language Death [dannyreviews.com] 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?

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.

Priorities

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.

Ah, Tabarnak!

/Unfunny, obscure attempt at Canadian political humour

Tolkien Would Say "Damn Shame"

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

Sanskrit simplification

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

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.

Good! The Village Is Getting Bigger

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.

the death of language in free nations

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.

What a silly reason

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.

Sanskrit was an artifical language itself

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:Evolution

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.

Re:Japanese

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).

Spelling, in Japanese and English

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"?)