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."
Does it matter? (Score:4, Insightful)
Humbug (Score:5, Insightful)
Human languages dying may be a pity (or not), but it does not have anything to do with computer programming.
The languages that are lost (Score:3, Insightful)
The time will come when we only have one language left, but not soon.
Re:English is the world language (maybe) (Score:5, Insightful)
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) (Score:5, Insightful)
3,400 languages left (Score:2, Insightful)
So, we're considering the 3,400 languages that will be left a common standard for communication?
I'm not trying to be a meany; but come on, that's a pretty odd statement to make.
plausible but ease of use? (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.)
Article doesn't mention the net... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:English is the world language (maybe) (Score:2, Insightful)
Japanese (Score:0, Insightful)
Where did you get that idea? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Hard To Believe (Score:5, Insightful)
I think linguistic and Computer science could, and some would argue should, be much more intertwined.
Re:Hard To Believe (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Hard To Believe (Score:1, Insightful)
If everybody conversed to each other as well as wrote programs in novospeak, we'd all start to dress, look, and think the same. This means diminishing ability to deal with new and unforeseen problems.
Of course, if you're sure we'll never see new and unforeseen problems again, we won't need the ability to adapt and deal with them and we have nothing to worry about.
The technology we create is indeed silicon based and runs on electricity, but our inherent technology is still carbon based and runs (ultimately) on sunlight. Then again, so do our powerplants.
Re:Does it matter? (Score:3, Insightful)
The ability to read Egyptian hieroglyphics was lost from ~400 C.E. until Napoleon lead the looters into Egypt ~1800 and one of his troops tripped over the Rosetta Stone. [I was watching the History Channel this morning.] Plenty of records of the language were lying about, but no record players.
Re:English is the world language (maybe) (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hard To Believe (Score:3, Insightful)
Yet, some commands are abbreviated and criptic to deflate. They aren't real English, that is. But no one complains.
It seems like we have two different "concepts." A localized semantic approach or a cryptic set of letters that we still understand because we know what the command does.
If English, etc. goes away, English commands would still be viable, since we know what the command does (e.g. I may know what Exp stands for, but I know what it does). Or, we can keep updating languages to be local to whatever vernacular.
To me, neither seems more or less desierable or usable as long as week keep traditional commands.
Either way, I don't think we will lose touch with programming; we only lose touch with certain programming languages, and that is only a mild possibility, since I'm sure there are quite a few uni-lingual non-anglophones that write in very English languages, like VB, and make it along quite well.
Re:Humbug (Score:1, Insightful)
Sure, you can write BIOS code in FORTH, do it right the first time (or before you forget what you're doing), and then use it for years. But you won't find Quake II re-written in FORTH; the syntax is just too bizarre for most programmers to read, and the reason it appears bizarre is because of our exposure to human languages as our first languages. These human biases account for the popularity of word-based programming languages (assembler, C) over number-based languages (machine code), and the popularity of roughly train-of-thought languages (C, VB, FORTRAN, etc.) over deeply recursive languages (FORTH).
Concerning poetry, bear in mind that generally one must be fully fluent in a language in order to appreciate poetry in that language; it is widely held that poetry does not translate well. An English-only speaker with only a casual knowledge of C should not expect to appreciate the elegance of a rapidly converging quadratic optimizer any more than he would Russian poetry. With that in mind, any lack of poetry in COBOL says more about COBOL than it does about the expressiveness of programming languages in general.
Re:Japanese (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
Re:Hard To Believe (Score:2, Insightful)
Computer languages have evolved constantly. Assembly, C, Java, etc all are ways to represent zeroes and ones to the programmer essentially, but they all organize it differently. I believe that most computer languages today that aren't zeroes and ones directly developed with an English speaker in mind. How do you know for certain that a programming language using Chinese characters, for instance, won't prove more efficient? Especially for Chinese speakers. I don't consider Chinese a dying language by any means, but it offers a different structuring of ideas. Dying languages might also offer a different way to represent things you can do with zeroes and ones. I have no idea myself without studying these languages themselves.
So, while I do sort-of agree with your point, I don't think you should completely count out the usefulness of obscure languages out when talking about computer programming languages.
Just trying to offer a counterpoint.
Re:Hard To Believe (Score:2, Insightful)
No nouns? Apart from int, float...
Re:Hard To Believe (Score:3, Insightful)
do while not [some condition]
[some code]
loop
Besides, he said BASED on English. Languages are, it seems to me, shorthand for English.
Re:English is the world language (maybe) (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Humbug (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
You think in a language. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:What a buncha baloney! (Score:2, Insightful)
I think it's why simple but messy languages like Perl continue to be more popular than stuff like lisp. Just as in the real world none of the many "ideal" spoken/written languages developed by academia have ever really won out over the lexical hodge-podge of traditional languages.
Personally, I have trouble trusting any language where it's developers spend more time talking about the language syntax than they do talking about the project they're actually working on. To me, it's a sign the language's complexity may be hurting development more than any of it's supposed advantages are helping. Heck, even popular languages like C++ gets dangerously close to that sometimes.
Re:Does it matter? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a wealth of poetry, folklore, and culture that is vanishing. Perhaps it's more efficient for everyone on earth to speak the languages of 3 or 4 dominant cultures, but it means that human society will be far less vibrant.
Small societies with strong senses of identity and history produce more of interest than many larger societies. Ancient Athens in the fourth century BC had a population of only aroun 60 thousand (less than 30 thousand if you only count those who were allowed to become educated) and yet the philosophy, science, mathematics, literature, and political thought that it produced overwhelmingly dwarfs (for instance) the suburbs of Atlanta, which contain many times more people with a much more widespread access to education and literacy.
So yes, I'm a luddite. I think progress should always be questioned. And immediate gains in efficiency, production, and practical utility are frequently not in the long term beneficial. If all human society should aim for is production-consumption-growth then count me out, give this place back to the other animals, they were doing a much better job of sharing.
This message paid for by the society of appreciators of variety and charm over success and power. Someone find me a city-state where I can go be an olive farmer.
Re:English is the world language (maybe) (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Language and Computer Science (Score:2, Insightful)
It's true that you can write a lot of programs without getting into grammar and language theory. (However, these programs would bore me, and a lot of other people.)
You won't get very far into computer science (or for that matter, modern logic) without getting into (stuff very related to) "20th century linguistics".
What me worry? (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
Just a thought.
Re:English is the world language (maybe) (Score:2, Insightful)
Not only that. There are already a whole bunch of different versions of Chinese languages that can't be understood by each other.
And I think English is fracturing into different versions that will, increasingly, be "foreign" to each other.
Maybe there will many fewer languages in the world in a few centuries, but I don't think there will ever be just one.
- dcobbler: the world needs another blog: www.digitalcobbler.com/blog
Re:Language is Cognition also (Score:2, Insightful)
a language that's worth anything doesn't naturally face extinction.
Um, yeah right, having 90% of the population wiped out by foreign diseases and then being put in a boarding school where you get whipped for speaking in your native tongue, those have got nothing to do with the language becoming extinct. Instead it's the language's "worth" that determines extinction. How exactly is that measured, with a "lingo-worth-o-meter"? Where can I get one?
No, but it's *everyone's* second language (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Snow (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This ruins my day. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Life cycles of languages (Score:3, Insightful)
The author of the article is simply lamenting that the underlings in the world aren't on a petri dish for study.
Quite frankly, I see a world where people are free to chose the language that best suits their personal goals as the most interesting world to study and live in.
The article fails to make mention of any new language formed in the next generations...nor does it acknowledge that such new languages formed in an industrial era are likely to include cognitive structures that languages to date lack.
BTW, if French was becoming the world language, the academic community would probably be applauding the disappearance of lesser languages.
Re:Panini? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
linguistics and cognitive science (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hard To Believe (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Take it from a highly trained ninja linguist..... (Score:5, Insightful)
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:You think in a language. (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't think in a language. You *speak* in one (Score:5, Insightful)
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".
the death of language in free nations (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Take it from a highly trained ninja linguist... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
What a silly reason (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:You don't think in a language. You *speak* in o (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Does it matter? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think that we exactly lost a great deal due to the Inca and Mayan religions being eliminated. Human sacrifice not that great an idea.
Equally the loss of the conquistador and colonial cultures was on balance a good thing.
Humans define themselves by our differences.
Some people do. Others define themselves by their achievements.
Re:Take it from a highly trained ninja linguist... (Score:1, Insightful)
You say that, but it isn't true. It's very much possible to analyse and express a thought which doesn't have a word assigned to it. Also, what do you mean by "lacking the grammar"? I'd be interested to see an example of the grammar of a language making a thought unexpressable. Most supposed examples of this have been thoroughly debunked.
How do you think, except in terms of those convenient labels?
New concepts can be expressed by combining existing labels. This is just standard compositionality of meaning, and it's fundamental to all human and computer languages. What makes you so sure we can only think in terms of "convenient labels"? It's just not the case that people think in terms of whatever words there are available -- otherwise, why would people keep rephrasing their sentences to make what they were trying to say clearer, and how would people learn the meanings of words? It's obvious that there is not an easy or transparent mapping from thought to sentence.
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.
Rubbish, there are subtle differences in colour which I can't describe very effectively in English, but I certainly notice them if they're important. Also, while they may describe colours differently, people who speak these languages certainly do not perceive the world in black and white -- I'm sure they could tell the difference between something red and something green if it was important (e.g. red berries kill you, green berries don't). Imagine that we had to deal with a similar situation, but the different berries were subtly different shades of purple. We might not be able to describe the difference in colour to other people using English, we'd have to get them to look at the different berries, but you can bet that unless the difference in colour was very subtle, they'd have no problem remembering the difference. We perceive differences in colour because we have rods and cones; language can't change our biology.
The idea that language affects thought is basically discredited these days. Nobody seriously suggests that language affects thought in anything more than a very limited way. Imagine what would happen if we tried to work out how English speakers thought:
"English has essentially 3 tenses: past, present and future. English speakers tend to perceive all events as either taking place in the past, present, or future and find it difficult to express ideas about ongoing or perpetual events."
Of course ask any English speaker if that's true and they'll tell you it isn't, but that's basically the sort of half-arsed pseudo-analytic twaddle that most of these language-affecting-thought myths are based on.
Re:In related news: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you want a "natural" language for computers then it would have to be necessarily of Chomsky-0 type.
Whoa, why would that have to be the case? People have made all sorts of arguments for some natural languages being context-free, regular, star-free, etc. In either case you can have very expressive subsets that are context-free. If natural languages could only be expressed by Type-0 grammars, then we would have a real problem explaining how humans process language.
it's well known that the grammar for all human languages follows the same basic rules (Chomsky's hypothesis)
It doesn't matter whether it's well known or not -- it's a hypothesis. (And not a particularly concrete one at that. If you don't say explicitly what the common structure of all languages is, it's pretty much devoid of content. ) But suppose you have a specific hypothesis that says something about all human languages. Then it makes sense to test it against as much data as you can get your hands on, and that includes languages that are about to become extinct.
Re:Hard To Believe (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You don't think in a language. You *speak* in o (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Panini? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
There are a few problems with these statements, aside from the purposeful misspelling of "programmers", here.
India can produce good Programmers in the same way that any nation can, by teaching Computer Science and enforcing intellectual discipline. I don't agree that there is a cultural predisposition involved.
What do you mean by "so many"? You can't assume that India produces more good Programmers as compared to the total population than other countries. Maybe they do have a higher percentage, or maybe they just have a lot of people, period (over 1 billion).
Every culture has been using reason and mathematics for thousands of years, and mathematics is the basis of programming.
Re:Hard To Believe (Score:3, Insightful)
Languages were grown to suit best the needs of their speakers, if we lose one language we lose a little bit of history, things that we'll never discover again. If you are one of those who think ancient discoveries aren't worth it think about all the wonder drugs extracted from the amazonian fruits. Possibly a shaman knew about some of them, but nobody asked, or nobody could.
If a plant name's aproximate translation would be "remove big ugly nasty thing in body" it's because of something.
Now about imposing. If I went to America I would have to learn english (not that it would be hard now). If you come to Spain you'll have to learn spanish. And if you came to Catalonia it would be nice if you at least learned to understand catalan. I don't mind if you speak or not. But letting me speak my language in my land while you are a resident in it would be fair.
I'm sick of all the people defending the extermination of cultures, because that is what you're doing. If you don't want to help them don't do it, but don't hinder them.
About the Difference Engine... isn't that a fiction work by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling? And if I recall it correctly the diference engine was never built because it was not possible with the tecnology at that time.
But that doesn't mean Ada could not program. There are already some quantic computer's program, but there is no quantic computer build yet. The chicken has come before the egg.
Re:What me worry? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm 28, and I already find that there are groups of youths in London where I live that are difficult to understand when talking amongst themselves because they're creating new words and contractions all the time. In certain areas of Norway, where I'm from, I noticed a couple of years ago that many students had started adopting words from Arabic, Vietnamese and other languages used by the immigrant population, simply because many of them go to schools that are have high number of immigrants.
Languages change. Deal. Sometimes use of a language changes enough that it could be justifiably called a new language. To think that having fewer mutually incomprehensible languages means that there won't still be significant differences shows little attention to what is going on.
The same thing goes for culture. So traditions observed by some small group somewhere dies out. So what? New traditions are being created every day. New groups arise, but are often not immediately visible to us because they don't consist of strange looking natives of some far away place carrying out weird rituals - they consists of strange looking natives of your own back yard carrying out weird rituals. It might not be codified in religious texts or have been subjected to anthropological studies, but that doesn't mean it isn't a culture.
If you go out in any moderately large city and LOOK, you could likely easily spot a wide diversity of cultural phenomena that are completely alien to you, and more so than many traditions of dying cultures. They are just more hidden, because they are integrated into a culture you are used to - they may not wear strange clothes, or other visible signs, or they do, but only at special occasions. They may not speak a strange language, or they do, but it's hidden in a veneer of a language you know, and only used when speaking to eachother.
I'd challenge anyone to describe "Western culture" for instance in a way that even a dozen of slashdotter's could agree on, without reducing it to just a handful of vague statements. Any attempt at a comprehensive description would strand on account of not taking into account all the significant variations, whether in lifestyle choices, local traditions that you simply don't notice until you start living with them, language differences you don't realise until you find yourself in a situation where your way of phrasing something is utterly misunderstood, or sub-cultures you normally only see the surface of because you are not "one of them" and not included.
Where is the threat of monoculture?
Re:Programming in Chinese (Score:2, Insightful)
What would Chinese characters trickling down a green-phosphor screen represent?
Re:Hard To Believe (Score:3, Insightful)
If I have a stupid servant who speaks very little english, and I want him to wash my car, it is easy enough for me to communicate that to him through hand signals and some commonly understood words. That is the same as what I do when I program a computer. It is primitive, but it works. It would not help in the least for me to learn Sanskrit.
Obviously there is a lot of room for improvement in computer languages, and it is natural for us to look under boulders. However, it seems unlikely to me that some mysterious higher order logic becomes obvious through knowledge of another language.
Re:Hard To Believe (Score:3, Insightful)
If we are going to pick nits, lets really pick them.
While potential based digital circuits are likely more common, current oriented circuits do exist. Back in the olden days of yore, "current loop" was a common serial data protocol, until RS-232 became dominant for most applications. Google for "current loop" serial for some examples of digital current oriented interfaces.