Extinction Of Human Languages Affects Programming? 626
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."
yes, (Score:0, Informative)
Re:Hard To Believe (Score:1, Informative)
uhh... wrong....
The first programmer was german (Zuse) and he certainly didn't use a language (except for cursing when another tube broke).
Real meaning is language independent (Score:4, Informative)
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:Hard To Believe (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hard To Believe (Score:2, Informative)
At the end of the day, the computer understands a two-symbol alphabet: ZERO and ONE. It understands a variety of 'words' and other contructs formed in that alphabet. That language is typically referred to as the "instruction set".
Re:Tragic, but not for CS (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Hard To Believe (Score:3, Informative)
Wrong (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not convinced (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Spelling, in Japanese and English (Score:4, Informative)
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"?)
Re:Snow (Score:4, Informative)
From Rick Mendosa's site [mendosa.com]:
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.
Tolkien Would Say "Damn Shame" (Score:5, Informative)
Somehow, we need to discover a way not only to document these languages but to keep them alive. Perhaps we can find a parallel in those who learn Tolkien's languages for the sheer joy of it. Somewhere in our large world, there has to be a handful of people who want to speak Middle Chulym.
--Mike Perry, Inkling Books, Seattle
Author: Untangling Tolkien: A Chronology and Commentary for The Lord of the Rings
Re:English is the world language (maybe) (Score:2, Informative)
"lingua franca
It's a wasted day when you don't something new or learn that something you knew wasn't correct.
However, French was the language of diplomacy (a world language) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Check out "BabelCode" (Score:1, Informative)
BabelCode Project investigates a new methodology of controlled translation and makes it available for practical use. By-products such as foreign language writing assistants and learning tools are also useful applications based on BabelCode databases.
http://www.babelcode.org
Language usage patterns can be effectively stored as various BabelCode elements, therefore any natural language can be saved this way.
Sanskrit simplification (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:In related news: (Score:3, Informative)
According to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis [wikipedia.org]:
Studies (Berlin & Kay, 1969) have shown that people perceive differences in color differently based on their language, satisfying tenet 1. Tenet 2 is generally believed to be unable to be proven or disproven using methods that anyone can think of right now.
Now, differences in thought are often more evidently reflected by differences in language, for it is language that often transmits thought. For example, the Tobrianders of Papua New Guinea think and speak in a non-linear matter. While many of us have been trained since birth to connect the dots, often in books of numbered dot diagrams, they emphasize patterns over linearity. By losing this language, we also lose, to some extent, their unique pattern of thought.
Re:Hard To Believe (Score:4, Informative)
Operators function as verbs.
Variables and constants function as nouns.
Re:languages do not disappear (Score:3, Informative)
Some evolve or merge into others, as you suggest, but many others actually do disappear leaving at most the names of a few geographic locations as the only part "merged" into other languages. Hundreds of American Indian languages disappeared when the populations were decimated by disease or war and the few remaining members were either separated from each other or subjected to language "re-education". I've talked to a number of American Indians who went through "re-education" (supposedly for their own benefit) in the 1950s - they got beaten or had to eat soap if they were caught speaking their own language. Languages not only disappear, they get killed off.
Re:English is the world language (maybe) (Score:3, Informative)
Cause and effect backwards here. French became the language of diplomacy in the mid 17th century as protestant countries tended to largely abandon the use of Latin. The problem was that most of the available Latin interpreters were Catholic priests, and these were not generally considered trustworthy by Protestant monarchs. French was the language of commerce, it made sense to use it for diplomatic negotiations.
It was the rise of the British empire in the 19th century that laid the ground for French being replaced. Half the world was ruled from London. When the US began to become an industrial power after the civil war the position of English was strengthened.
By the time the league of nations was formed the French were already becomming worried that French was a second class language.
Re:The languages that are lost (Score:2, Informative)
Frankly I think this is BS. English didn't come prewritten with words for CD or hyperthreading. Someone made up new words and then explained them to their friends. Other languages do the same thing. There's no fundamental reason that Chinese, Kurdish, or Urdu couldn't expand to explain things like quarks or spam or anything else (assuming they haven't already, which I realise is pretty short-sighted of me). Language is a fairly spontaneous mapping of arbitrary symbols to meaning. There are no restrictions on what language can do.
There's also no reason to believe we'd ever end up with only one language. Perhaps increased mobility and ease of communication will reduce the total number of languages in use, but even in Canada or the US there are significant linguistic differences between neighbouring provinces or states, and the majority of people speak English in both countries. I would even venture to say that people from rural areas in Newfoundland speak nearly a different language than people from rural areas in Louisiana but they'd both tell you they're speaking English. Even as languages converge on each other, there are elements within each language that spin out from the centre and introduce new variations. I don't believe there's any reason to expect that to stop.
Ian
Hindi and Urdu??? (Score:2, Informative)
Re: languages do not disappear (Score:3, Informative)
> they evolve or merge with more influential ones.
No, some disappear without a trace. In contact situations where one of the languages is associated with power and status, speakers of the other language will often give it up for the status language. If the number of speakers is small, the language can disappear within a few generations.
You have got it ass backwards (Score:5, Informative)
Chomsky's position is that people have language organs in their brain that define a Universal Grammar (UG) of syntax. It is this UG that explains why no natural language exhibits the full power of a context sensitive grammar. [Chomsky takes this position because he denies that meaning has any effect on syntax.]
Now the funny thing is that given all the noise made over UG very little if anything is known about it. There is not some large collection of rules. In fact every time someone says something like "this english construction behaves the way it does because of a constraint from UG" somebody goes and finds a language like Malagasy where the constraint does not hold and thus it cannot be a part of UB.
Re:Take it from a highly trained ninja linguist... (Score:2, Informative)
Have you read George Orwell's 1984? It describes a tyranical world that goes to great lengths to prevent any form of dissent. One of the things that is happening in the world is that a new language called 'Newspeak' is being developped. The idea is that 'Newspeak' is a language that is designed to prevent the expression of ideas that go contrary to the system. It's basically a simplified form of English, but if you think in 'Newspeak', you are less likely to form a rebelious idea. Of course, 'Newspeak' is only a hurdle to those peole who don't think abstractly enough.
Re:Hard To Believe (Score:4, Informative)
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:Humbug (Score:3, Informative)
Re:No, but it's *everyone's* second language (Score:3, Informative)
Um, I don't think you've developed a proper appreciation of how big the world really is. Yes, English is widely used as a lingua franca. But that doesn't mean that the speech patterns of Jamaicans, East Londoners and Indians all over the world are converging. If anything, they're getting more idiosyncratic with the passage of time.
Re:No, but it's *everyone's* second language (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hard To Believe (Score:4, Informative)
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:Take it from a highly trained ninja linguist... (Score:3, Informative)
According to her there is a language belonging to an Amazonian tribe where you *have* to put how you know something. For example, if you say that Jack told you something you have to also say how he told you. For example if he phoned you you would say "Jack told me, non-visually."
With examples like that, I'd have to say that it is perfectly possible for language to define how a society operates and how people think.
Take for example also the Chinese language. The Chinese language is tonal. This means that songs that people write have to take this into account so that people can actually understand what you're singing. Modern songs aren't so bad esp. Mandarin songs as Mandarin only has a few tones and is much more forgiving of tonal mistakes. But Cantonese has 7 and older Chinese languages have 9. They figure out how to sing centuries old songs where only the lyrics survive by working out the tones of the words. That is an example of the language influencing the entire musical heritage of the culture. I've also noticed that word plays are much more popular in Chinese and Japanese than in English, because there are so many words that sound similar. In English you only have a limited subset of words for familial relations. In Chinese, there is a title for practically every permutation of familial relation you can have. For example the wife of your father's older brother has a different title to the wife of your mother's young brother and to your father's older sister and to your mother's older sister and your father's younger brother's wife etc. etc. Also close non-blood ties are usually expressed in family terms like big brother or Uncle (one of the many terms for uncle depending on if they are your father or mother's friend and whether they are older or younger than your father/mother), or little sister etc. Hell, there is a tradition in many families of choosing given names that reflect which generation you are so when you meet someone from your family you can tell how senior/junior they are to you from their names (this practice became defunct after the Communists) This just displays the importance of family in China. That the Chinese think in terms of family units and family ties waaaay more than native English speaking cultures do. In fact even government structure is seen in terms of family with the Emperor being the "father" of the nation and the obedience people have to the Emperor being seen as the same sort of obedience a son owes his father. This is embodied in Confucianism - though note that Confucius merely put together what people had already thought for a long time. That is a very large difference in thinking that is reflected in the different languages.
Also looking at 1984, the entire focus on Newspeak was to get rid of words like "freedom" (or subvert their meaning). It is much harder to think of a concept if you don't have a word for it.
I disagree with the statement that new versions of Chinese will spring up. If you look at China, Mandarin is so wide-spread in the north because of the Central Plains region. Good geography easy spread. Language diversity and genetic diversity is much larger in the south due to the much more difficult terrain of the south which limits the spread of languages. This also made the south much more easily defensible than the north as has been shown many times in Chinese history with the Yangtze river the single greatest defensive barrier in China (esp. against northerners who don't know how to fight on water). It was a lot more useful than the Great Wall ever was. The reason why they didn't diversify more was because the Chinese Empire was very good at reintegrating those regions back into the Empire after every time the Empire broke up and there were a lot of migrations from the north esp. masses of refugees during times of turmoil in the north. Modern technology makes the geographical reasons for the language diversity in the south null.
Re:Language and Computer Science (Score:2, Informative)
Doesn't Perl's $_ variable come close?