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."
Hard To Believe (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
English is the world language (maybe) (Score:2, Interesting)
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. (I also think the concept of the Nation-State will be abolished by then -- it's only about 500 years old).
What a buncha baloney! (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
In related news: (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Hard To Believe (Score:5, Interesting)
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:English is the world language (maybe) (Score:3, Interesting)
Language and Computer Science (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Snow (Score:2, Interesting)
Tragic, but not for CS (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
languages do not disappear (Score:4, Interesting)
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.h
Re:English is the world language (maybe) (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Language is Cognition also (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Does it matter? (Score:3, Interesting)
But we don't have a record, in most cases. I'd say about 50% of human languages are pretty thoroughly documented. Another 30% have sketchy documentation. The final 20% are all but unknown to researchers (most of these are in New Guinea).
We really need to talk to the dying generation of New Guineans, Siberians, and Africans who speak these disappearing languages so that there will be a record, like you say. But do you have the money to send out a few thousand linguists? Me neither.
I don't think so. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Does it matter? (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Tragic, but not for CS (Score:2, Interesting)
Isn't that a Joseph Stalin famous quote ?
"Take away their language, and you'll take away their soul"
Language is not wholly dependent on technology (Score:3, Interesting)
The languages that are lost are the ones that do not contain the technical leanguage to survive contact with whatever absorbs them.
Are you kidding?? I'm not sure how literally and how completely you mean this, but I very much doubt that technology is such a prime factor as you imply.
I'm not a linguist, but I'd be pretty sure that the death of each and every language in history would make for its own PhD thesis. There would be too many factors and too many interactions to boil it down to such a simple formula. Besides technology, there's culture, economics, religion, and probably a slew of other factors that neither of us could imagine.
I could be wrong, but I'd be amazed if so...
Re:English is the world language (maybe) (Score:3, Interesting)
i just spent a weekend some good friends of mine, who are married.
The guy speaks cantonese, and the girl speaks mandarin. It's very interesting! They speak to each other using english, but when they speak to their respective parents, they use their native tongue. It's comforting to stand there and have one look as clueless as me, when the other is speaking their native language.
we watched Shaolin Soccer the other day as well, and one had to read the subtitles, while the other watched the movie normally! (I believe Shaolin Soccer is in cantonese...iirc)
anyway...i have a feeling that 300 years from now, english and mandarin will be the dominant languages.
Re:Humbug (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Does it matter? (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, and just to be nit-picky (sorry, it's in my nature) Things are affected, the effects are observed.
Var'aq, the Klingon Programming Language (Score:5, Interesting)
The var'aq [geocities.com] page.
Good! The Village Is Getting Bigger (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Language and Computer Science (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Take it from a highly trained ninja linguist... (Score:1, Interesting)
I think this analogy is flawed.. I may be able to see a whole world full of colour, but without words to describe it, how do I share those thoughts?
If it still isn't clear, try describing a scene, vibrant in colour, with only 'light' and 'dark'. That green tree over there? Ok, sure, it's.. well, maybe a little 'darker' than the light blue horizon. Take the colour out, and you get "that tree is lighter than that horizon". Picture it without the colours, and you're expressing yourself 'colourblind'.
(Sure, another person listening could see what you mean by context and by looking at the tree and the horizon, but go to a more abstract topic, and what happens? Language does limit you.)
Re:English is the world language (maybe) (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/phorum/top
a choice quote:
"Cantonese is the 20th most widely spoken language in the world, while Mandarin Chinese is #1 with English in second place. So, while Cantonese isn't a bad choice, Mandarin is clearly more useful. On the other hand, Cantonese is spoken as much as Mandarin in Chinese communities outsdie of China. It is dominant in Hong Kong and Malaysia. If you are doing business in these specific areas then Cantonese is a better choice than Mandarin. And Cantonese has greater similarity with classical Chinese than Mandarin in many respects, so it makes an excellent language for research."
First Programmer (Score:5, Interesting)
Turings genius was to get from adhoc discovery to the mathematics behind it , and turn a collection of interesting discoveries into a science
Sanskrit was an artifical language itself (Score:4, Interesting)
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:Take it from a highly trained ninja linguist... (Score:5, Interesting)
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
India (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm no expert on India, but your claim that I should think of the people of India does not apply. Remember, Britton ruled India for many years, they brought with their language when they ruled. Even those who were willing to learn the native language (instead of making the natives learn English) would find it hard to succeed because there are 18 different common languages in India, and few people speak many.
In short, while few people in India speak English as their first language, it is your best choice if you want to speak to a random person on the street and you don't know the local language.
Why do you think India is a popular place to outsource tech support to? There are a large number of people who know English and consider $20/day riches beyond belief. Of course the downside isn't discovered until latter when you realize that most speak with a thick accent that is hard for Americans to understand. (I'd presume the English have the same problem)
Re: Tragic, but not for CS (Score:3, Interesting)
> Linguistic family trees generally mirror genetic family trees.
That's not true. Consider the linguistic family tree leading up to present-day English, and then consider the genetic family tree leading up to present-day English speakers.
While there is surely a positive correlation, "mirrors" is far too strong a word.
Pedantic notes:
> 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
Welsh is an IE language.
Pro[to]-Indo-European is the reconstructed parent language for the whole family. Its children spread from India to Ireland, but PIE itself didn't.
Re:Hard To Believe (Score:2, Interesting)
The question is, as always, "What do we choose to be tolerant of". Most people these days base their choice on the ancient Wiccan saying "An it harm none, do as ye will" (ie. it's OK if it doesn't hurt anyone). The difference between myself and most other people comes in the definitions of "harm" and "anyone". For example, I include God in the anyone, and most other people don't. Some of the things I think harm other people aren't seen that way by others. Who makes the choices?
Any law made implicitly imposes cultural values. For example, in some cultures, vigilante justice is the norm and acceptable. I'm sure you can all think of practises around the world ("cultural values") which we would not allow in Western countries (cultural values imposed by law).
These are interesting questions, to which I don't have the answers, although I think I tend to lean towards right-wing libertarianism (or more likely, middle-wing libertarianism
Re:Take it from a highly trained ninja linguist... (Score:5, Interesting)
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:English is the world language (maybe) (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Take it from a highly trained ninja linguist... (Score:2, Interesting)
not blunt answer: yes and...no, language DOES SLIGHTLY limit thought, because the structure of a given lang favors certain ways of thinking, pure thought is unusual or so I think(unless you have very simple thoughts: blue, sex...), You usually *think* in your language terms, be english, spanish, japanese, deutsch...etc
The most limiting part be real or perceived, appears when this thought becomes expressed, then is when the language limitations(not to mention the user's) come more heavily into play.
Language isn't merely a labeling system, vocabulary is only a brick, the cement and disposition of these components are more important
i.e. english isn't my native lang and I find hard to be very specific while using it, it always have a certain ambiguity, that my spanish doesn't, unless I'm really trying to be vague, don't ask me why, but when using german I kinda sound angered/dead-serious or very polite(and more vague) when japanese.
I can transmit the idea in several langs but it won't come across *exactly*, I believe language affects mostly the message/messenger but little the thought-process of said messenger or the receiver, and the effect on thought is more in that it facilitates some avenues of thinking.
To think about:
-Moon and sun have gender in english?
-Why moon is male in german but female in spanish? moon=cold, serious, menacing, dark, men attributes according to germans, funny, but to spanish speakers is the other way: misterious, beatiful, soft, soothing.
-moreso spanish and german provide a gender to things(germans go an add a neutral 'das'), english doesn't, and japanese simplifies even more: no gender a no quantity, so neko could be cat,cats, either male or female hu?.
Where does progress come from? (Score:3, Interesting)
Disclaimer: I am not an expert on Ancient Athens, so I welcome any insight on the following theory.
Did the incredible leaps in many disciplines come because the population was small? Or did they happen because there were a few great thinkers who impressed their students with enough different ideas that the ideas were expanded and elaborated in a dominant culture so the ideas survived and spread.
It seems that most of the thinkers in Ancient Athens were influenced by Socrates, who got his ideas from Archelaus, who learned from Anaxagoras. If these men had lived in Messenia, the world may have lost their ideas.
(Sorry if I sound like Ayn Rand, but I believe one great programmer is worth 20 mediocre programmers. The correlation would be that a few great thinkers have much greater influence than tons of mediocre thinkers.)
In Ancient Athens, "philosophy, science, mathematics, literature, and political thought" were very closely related subjects. Today each is considered a separate discipline. Scientists and mathematicians do not want to consider the philosophy or politics of their work. (American) Politicians are sometimes proud of their lack of knowledge about the sciences. Does the separation help because we focus more, or does it hurt because it is more difficult for ideas to transfer between disciplines?
- Example: The horrors of "monoculture" were only noticed because the word "virus" is used by both biology and computer science. What other ideas from biology could advance the infant science of computers? People have started checking biology for ideas, but what about other sciences? Maybe tectonics has good ideas about integrating large masses of code.
--- Off-topic
Anybody else notice the correlations between Ancient Athens and the U.S.? Both started well with a class system that encouraged slavery. Slavery was abolished. The main product (wheat for Athens; cotton/manufacturing for the US) was offshored, so they moved to a secondary but more profitable export (olive oil and wine; technology). Both were major economic centers for their time. Both were attacked by Persia, although the US has survived so far.
Re:Take it from a highly trained ninja linguist... (Score:1, Interesting)
Man, I love Slashdot. So many people who think they're smart, trying so hard to sound like they know what they're talking about. This isn't directed at you specifically, parent. Just to the frustration I have sometimes listening to the bs that we geeks post. It's funny because when you think about how we ream non-technical people that talk about technical stuff as if they knew what they were talking about (hit them with the cluestick, right?) but then we in turn seem quite keen on turning around and trying to sound knowledegable when in fact, we aren't.
Ok, now to get back on topic. The idea that language affects thought is known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and is widely discredited today. I'm not about to sit around and teach you dorks linguistics, but if you're curious, google awaits.
Oh, and I just found this cool link, if you already know something about Sapir-Whorf. It talks about non-linear time systems in Native American Languages and what Whorf was really about, claiming that he actually had little to do with hypothesis he is named after. Interesting read. See, you learn something knew everyday. It postulates that Whorf's idea of linguistic relativity is actually a spin on Einstein's use of the word. Who knew?
Link: Sapir-Whorf and what to tell students these days [enformy.com]
Other types of logic? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's an interesting problem, because the things that computers do today are pretty straight-ahead. I'm sure that 40% of the people reading this can reverse-engineer most systems/programs just by hearing a description of how those systems behave.
So what kinds of systems are impossible to describe right now? I suppose those would be predictive systems, like weather or human behavior, drug modeling, etc. In fact, modeling is in need of its own type of language and logic, because in models things happen because of conditions that aren't necessarily known beforehand - the system is non-deterministic.
Right now (from what I gather) simulating a non-deterministic system is a real PITA. And they're hard to code, too, becuase everything is happening at once. So you timeslice everything, but it's not quite the same.
Now what would be really, really useful would be a general-purpose analog computer. When you deal in the analog realm, you don't really have to do a lot of the gruntwork because the nature and properties of the medium take care of a lot of that. I think what analog computing boils down to is designing feedback loops - I have a vague understanding of analog computing, most of it from a lot of layman reading of cognitive sciences, genetics/genomics, etc. The downside is there may be on the order of a few hundred thousand or million interactions that need to be designed, but that probably compares favorably to the amount of code that'd be written otherwise.
Anyway, I'm just sort of rambling on, but it's interesting stuff to think about.
Re:Take it from a highly trained ninja linguist... (Score:3, Interesting)
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."
"I think this analogy is flawed.. I may be able to see a whole world full of colour, but without words to describe it, how do I share those thoughts?"
Both of you need to go back and actually read NTiOzymandias' post. S/He never said that expression didn't rely on language, s/he was talking about the independence of *thought* from language.
Re:Does it matter? (Score:3, Interesting)
What, by the way, is an achievement, but a difference that makes us stand out from humanity?
It Helps less programmers stuffing things up (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Take it from a highly trained ninja linguist... (Score:2, Interesting)
Language can certainly influence thought, however as you point out well it does not limit or control thought.
To use your example of light and dark, a healthy person without the color words would see colors but would not normally care about what color something was. They would just think about the dark and lightness of objects they see. Obviously, once they were told about colors and taught the labels they would be able to recognize colors. However, I bet it would probably not be automatic for a while, if ever.
Language abstraction is a powerful influence. The descriptors(language) one uses to abstract one's environment can influence or mislead if the language 1. lacks perspective or 2. overloads words using stereotypes
EX. 1 Many languages lack a description of time. Everything is described in the present tense. There is not even a word for time. This gives rise to some interesting cause and effect or non-linear logic and language constructs.
EX. 2 In Cypriot Greek the word for black spoken with the female gender suffix means: Black Woman, Servant, Maid, Slave, subservient wife. Someone who only speaks this language is probably misled into not holding black women in high regard until taught otherwise.
Re:Tolkien Would Say "Damn Shame" (Score:2, Interesting)
Some other possibilities are Faeroese (not dying, but obscure), Frisian (closely related to English), Occitan (south of France), Cornish (dead, but revived), Rumansch (Switzerland), Romnimos ("Gypsy"), Wendish/Sorbian, and the extinct Prussian language. Americans might also consider Hawaiian.
Although these languages are obscure, it is possible to find documentation on most of them, often on the web - and in major university libraries. Quite a few of these languages are also represented by small colonies of immigrants in the US.
Chinese and OOP (Score:2, Interesting)