
Spoken Languages, Blub, and Convenience - breily
http://lethain.com/entry/2008/may/25/spoken-languages--blub--and-convenience/
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mynameishere
English has no dedicated future tense.

<http://www2.gsu.edu/~eslhpb/grammar/lecture_4/table3-1.htm>

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albertcardona
Incomplete article, yet starts an interesting discussion topic: are spoken
languages also distributed along a power continuum, in a similar way to
programming languages?

From personal experience: yes. I speak Spanish, Catalan, English and Russian.
In my opinion:

* English would be php: it's dead easy to mash together just about anything, and grammar and vocabulary are as inventive as you make them. Plus everybody understands it to some extent.

* Russian is Lisp: amazingly powerful, but hard to get right and to think in it (at least for a non-native like me -of course I'm biased.)

* Spanish is like java: everybody understands a bit of it, but getting started is terrible (one needs to know what subject, object, articles and verb conjugation are just to say the simplest of things.)

* Catalan is like Spanish, but much less widespread: perhaps a java-like language now nearly defunct because of lack of libraries and a powerful company/state behind it -take your pick.

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asdflkj
The formal features of natural languages (and their power) are irrelevant,
because using language in idiosyncratic ways is almost always bad. If everyone
else wrote Java-style code in Common Lisp, you could still write Lisp in
Common Lisp. Not so with natural languages--if you care about being
understood. It would be more useful to speak of literary/conversational
cultures associated with different languages, and those can differ quite a
lot. For example, many English-speakers accuse Dostoyevskiy of being
unrealistic because his characters routinely give long, elaborate monologues
to each other. But this is how Russians actually talk.

P.S.: Which isn't to say that natural languages are "mere conventions", as PG
once wrote. In practice, natural languages vary a lot in their power to
communicate different kinds of thoughts. But this is not due to any easily
identifiable features, e.g. in syntax. Going back to the programming language
metaphor: different cultures write different libraries for their language. And
only a culture as a whole can write the libraries, which makes them even more
important to the individual than libraries in a programming language.

