Yep, Noam Chomsky managed to lead astray a lot of English as a Second Language teachers for several decades.
A true language is what a whole society or culture uses to communicate face-to-face, and sometimes in a written form.
A computer language is an abstraction of machine code that establishes a scheme of useful operation for the intended machine; and in some situations may facilitate written or oral or visual communication over distances.
+++++
Being Heater, I am sure you will find something in there to disagree with.
Language and dialect are terms that are used metaphorically when we refer to 'computer language' or a computer language dialect'. Metaphor does not make something morph into something it is NOT. It is only a way of borrowing attributes of the original and assigning the similarity to something else.
If you say my girl friend is a dog.. am I to think that you mean she has four legs and a tail?
True languages do not require any technological device to convey meaning.. it is all au natural.
Noam Chomsky is a piece of work. His linguistic theories excited the world as they offered great promise for artificial intelligence. But some very smart people in the past few decades have pretty much demolished the validity of his concepts of generative grammar. Chinese is one language that has attributes that seem to contradict his claims.
Try to explain the pragmatics of idiomatic expressions via Generative Grammar.
Computer languages are like Esperanto. Someone comes up with a scheme that everyone starts out totally ignorant of, and then the founders claim that everyone will use it quite easily and quite well.
Your data may indicate sustained growth or may be beginning to indicate that new languages are in decline. Of course, much depends on how the counting is done. Can you give me a count on how many computer languages are considered obsolete and no longer in use?
And further more, the number of true languages is in decline as culture globalizes. So the trend toward reduction may be efficent in both.
Being Heater, I am sure you will find something in there to disagree with.
Oh yeah! It's not that I like to disagree it's just that I like to explore different views of a topic.
So where to begin? You have so much there...
A true language is what a whole society or culture uses to communicate face-to-face, and sometimes in a written form.
I don't understand lawyer speak, or medical speak, or accountant speak, or many others. Are you saying that whatever it is they are using to communicate is not "true language"? I'm inclined to, yes, disagree with that assessment.
Software people often communicate using source code. As we see on this forum everyday. That's not verbal, and it's not the totality of the communication. But in my mind it is as much "true language" as any other specialization.
A computer language is an abstraction of machine code that establishes a scheme of useful operation for the intended machine
That is totally backwards. A computer programming language is an expression of an algorithm. It's a mathematical construct. A computer program expresses that algorithm (mathematical concept) no matter if there are computers in existence that can run it or not.
The computer, the machine code, the very design of the hardware itself only exists because of those algorithmic ideas. That is the very reason for it's existence. The maths came first. The algorithms came first. The machine is just the way to get that done.
True languages do not require any technological device to convey meaning.
Exactly, an algorithm expressed in anything from ALGOL to Go does not actually need the machine to convey it's meaning from one human to another. I'm glad we agree.
Noam Chomsky is a piece of work...
I don't know what to make of Chomsky.
I tried listening to some of his presentations and I did not understand any of it. Not one single idea there I could get hold of. (Clearly he is not using "true language" )
But I know he did good work regarding classification of grammars and parsers that made some sense to me.
He has been at MIT longer than I have been alive. Is it all smoke an mirrors?
I would not totally blame Noam for the big optimism over AI. It has been in computer science since Babbage. Look at the Turing Test as an example. Otherwise very brilliant people totally over estimating what computer hardware and more importantly those algorithms can do. Or totally underestimating what it takes to be intelligent.
Personally I think "intelligence", whatever it is, has no strict definition, physically or mathematically, so I don't know why such smart mathematicians/scientists/engineers are even talking about it. But, us humans like to anthropomorphize everything so I guess computing machines are ripe for that.
...the number of true languages is in decline as culture globalizes...
So I have read many times. And I'm sure it's true.
It fascinates me though that almost dead languages have made huge comebacks in my lifetime. Over there in Wales the Welsh language made a resurgence. So much so that Welsh, in 2011, became the only officially recognized language in Great Britain. One can demand that the government communicates in Welsh and they have to do that. English does not have that status. Strange but true.
@Heater
I wouldn't worry too much about what you don't understand about linguistics and semantics, or human psychology.
Obviously, the languages of some societies and cultures are beyond you... we all tend to be self-limiting in this way.... some of us more so than others. Personally, I will skip the Welsh, Gaelic, and Swahili.
Nonetheless, lawyers, doctors, and even computer geeks have their own that others find unnecessary to learn. After all they have their own societies and cultures that seeks out conventions of communication.
With language, it is somewhat a mystery that we communicate at all. Cleverness alone and being logical is not enough to glean the actual meaning of a message. But a true language is how we communicate without the need for technology and all the formalisms. It is a significant component a sociological part of human life where we establish human relationships and systems of belief.
Let's just say that computers, microprocessors, and microcontrollers require a scheme to be assigned a task or many tasks, and such a scheme is referred to as a program that is commonly referred to as being represented via a computer language. That remains the purpose for which a computer language is intended, a regime of symbolic representation to be applied to a machine. The context is limited and will never be inclusive of the whole human experience.
I have yet to see a computer language that asserts a phonology as a formal part of its language specification for coding a program, or to fully document itself in its own language specification just to perfect communication in its own language. And yet, linguistics is defined as being inclusive of semantics, grammar, and phonology. Where exactly does a computer language fit into the study of linguistics?
Even programmers revert to their native languages when they collaborate about code or algorithm. I don't see anyone here that completely avoids English and relies solely on PBasic, Spin, or even GCC. And I happen to feel that will never happen.
When you get out of bed in the morning, do you immediately ponder what to do in GCC? And do you dream in Python or Java Script? Do you kiss your wife and say "main()...."
True languages just might be the prime infinite loop, and the balance is of our own ego defining the world as we personally prefer.
Hmm.. I'm not sure about this either, but my gut feeling is that computer languages are not like human languages. I love programming. That's what I do, all the time. I have learned to use many computer languages over the years. I use several different ones regularly. I also speak a limited number of human languages, some better than others. And I keep learning more of them, as it were. Not that I am fluent in lots of languages, far from it. But I can get by in a few. What I know is that, for me, and I deeply suspect this is true for others as well, having watched many people trying to learn a new human language, is that the process of learning it is totally different from learning a programming language. The only time I've seen some coherence is with Japanese, but not on the language level - Japanese is not like a computer language. The similarity is instead on another level, the language is deeply logical and the sentence structure is built up in a way that constantly triggers e.g. my "but that's how I build functions from functions" feeling. And sometimes some other aspect. But it's not like a computer language, it's more like programming. That's different.
So, as a person deeply interested in computer programming as well as human languages, I don't think they are very similar. Not really. The learning process is just so vastly different.
but but.. First came BCPL. Then, inspired by BCPL, came B. Which transformed into C. (And was side-tracked into C++, which clearly was a mistake, so forget that one). The next transformation would be the P language, before ending up with the perfect L language. What will happen to P? Should it be called ' ' then? Or just '..'?
Now worried,
-Tor
WYSIWYG -- Even Linux has not been able to stay completely logical. The jump from Ver 2.6 to Ver 3.0 seems to have been a brainwave inspired by celebration of an anniversary.
The problem with real languages are that we all learn the word 'language' and then spend a lifetime attempting to reconcile the meaning of that word. Since it is in the very nature of any language to change over time, trying to tie down a meaningful definition for all times and all situation is next to impossible. On top of that, vocabulary keeps expanding over one's entire life with dictionaries that never are able to contain it all.
On the other hand, learning C or PBasic hands me a short list of defined words, and some specific rules on syntax that can be easily kept in a reference book.
it is all very mysterious how one learns a natural language or how one acquires a meaningful message from a few utterances. But we seem to do it, and are able to debate with passion, express feelings, and amuse ourselves with paradoxes. A computer language will just freeze up and issue a diagnostic, but humans babble on and on.
QUOTE=Loopy Byteloose;1312241]Lovely observation. Nevertheless, a computer language is no more a true language that an honest thief is truly honest. We really do ourselves a dis-service when we get caught up in this nonsense.
Face the reality that in the history of computers, there was a period of rapid expansion where many many greedy fools tried to launch their own language to create a franchise that would bring them enormous wealth. Only a few prevailed, and only a few will endure.
It is all similar to breeding cockroaches. You start out with one female that lays a million or so eggs, and you merely get a few thousand... which are more than enough.[/QUOTE]
I agree there was a period of rapid expansion of computer languages, but I doubt greed was the reason for launching most of them. Ego (“I can create a better language than that.”) and adding functionality for specific application areas were more likely motives. Two early projects I am familiar with were examples of that.
The first was creating a macro language for performing financial calculations and text processing. Done strictly to provide the functionality needed for an order entry and billing application.
The second was OPL (Our Programming Language). An actual compiled language created in part for it's functionality, and partly for corporate bragging rights.
Hmm.. I'm not sure about this either, but my gut feeling is that computer languages are not like human languages. I love programming. That's what I do, all the time. I have learned to use many computer languages over the years. I use several different ones regularly. I also speak a limited number of human languages, some better than others. And I keep learning more of them, as it were. Not that I am fluent in lots of languages, far from it. But I can get by in a few. What I know is that, for me, and I deeply suspect this is true for others as well, having watched many people trying to learn a new human language, is that the process of learning it is totally different from learning a programming language. The only time I've seen some coherence is with Japanese, but not on the language level - Japanese is not like a computer language. The similarity is instead on another level, the language is deeply logical and the sentence structure is built up in a way that constantly triggers e.g. my "but that's how I build functions from functions" feeling. And sometimes some other aspect. But it's not like a computer language, it's more like programming. That's different.
So, as a person deeply interested in computer programming as well as human languages, I don't think they are very similar. Not really. The learning process is just so vastly different.
-Tor
I agree, there is not much similarity between computer and human languages. Computer languages are more logical and rigidly defined, although not completely logical. Human languages, and English in particular, have poorly defined structures and rules. One only has to listen to young children as they are learning to speak to find examples of that. At that age I often told my kids to be good, be nice, or behave, and one day one of them answered “ we are being haved”. A perfectly logical extrapolation, yet not proper English.
Learning a second language later in life is a humbling experience, especially for an intellectual. The whole processes challenges every premise that has gone previously unquestioned.
Up to a point, I enjoy learning computer languages for their compactness of purpose and use. It is much like studying a branch of mathematics or engineering. It seems such compact topics appeal to males; while females actually find learning true languages easier and more interesting.
For me, learning Chinese may actually have required me to patiently await physical changes in the brain while I endless apply effort to comprehend both the phonology and the character-based lexicon. After nearly 20 years immerses in Taiwan culture, I seem to have begun to feel some forward progress.
Still, nothing ventured... nothing gained. It would be hard to explain all that I have enjoyed learning from microcontrollers or from learning Chinese. Life would be rather dull without a few open-ended projects that challenge one to see more of what others are seeing or trying to achieve.
I am NOT heavily invested in a true language being something that a computer language can never be. It is just a working hypothesis based on teaching English to Taiwanese and learning Chinese.
Lingusitics is world often ignored by techies. And yet, just reading a good book on semantics it can be a real eye-opener that might start a life long journey of discovery.
Comments
A true language is what a whole society or culture uses to communicate face-to-face, and sometimes in a written form.
A computer language is an abstraction of machine code that establishes a scheme of useful operation for the intended machine; and in some situations may facilitate written or oral or visual communication over distances.
+++++
Being Heater, I am sure you will find something in there to disagree with.
Language and dialect are terms that are used metaphorically when we refer to 'computer language' or a computer language dialect'. Metaphor does not make something morph into something it is NOT. It is only a way of borrowing attributes of the original and assigning the similarity to something else.
If you say my girl friend is a dog.. am I to think that you mean she has four legs and a tail?
True languages do not require any technological device to convey meaning.. it is all au natural.
Noam Chomsky is a piece of work. His linguistic theories excited the world as they offered great promise for artificial intelligence. But some very smart people in the past few decades have pretty much demolished the validity of his concepts of generative grammar. Chinese is one language that has attributes that seem to contradict his claims.
Try to explain the pragmatics of idiomatic expressions via Generative Grammar.
Computer languages are like Esperanto. Someone comes up with a scheme that everyone starts out totally ignorant of, and then the founders claim that everyone will use it quite easily and quite well.
Your data may indicate sustained growth or may be beginning to indicate that new languages are in decline. Of course, much depends on how the counting is done. Can you give me a count on how many computer languages are considered obsolete and no longer in use?
And further more, the number of true languages is in decline as culture globalizes. So the trend toward reduction may be efficent in both.
So where to begin? You have so much there... I don't understand lawyer speak, or medical speak, or accountant speak, or many others. Are you saying that whatever it is they are using to communicate is not "true language"? I'm inclined to, yes, disagree with that assessment.
Software people often communicate using source code. As we see on this forum everyday. That's not verbal, and it's not the totality of the communication. But in my mind it is as much "true language" as any other specialization. That is totally backwards. A computer programming language is an expression of an algorithm. It's a mathematical construct. A computer program expresses that algorithm (mathematical concept) no matter if there are computers in existence that can run it or not.
The computer, the machine code, the very design of the hardware itself only exists because of those algorithmic ideas. That is the very reason for it's existence. The maths came first. The algorithms came first. The machine is just the way to get that done. Exactly, an algorithm expressed in anything from ALGOL to Go does not actually need the machine to convey it's meaning from one human to another. I'm glad we agree. I don't know what to make of Chomsky.
I tried listening to some of his presentations and I did not understand any of it. Not one single idea there I could get hold of. (Clearly he is not using "true language"
But I know he did good work regarding classification of grammars and parsers that made some sense to me.
He has been at MIT longer than I have been alive. Is it all smoke an mirrors?
I would not totally blame Noam for the big optimism over AI. It has been in computer science since Babbage. Look at the Turing Test as an example. Otherwise very brilliant people totally over estimating what computer hardware and more importantly those algorithms can do. Or totally underestimating what it takes to be intelligent.
Personally I think "intelligence", whatever it is, has no strict definition, physically or mathematically, so I don't know why such smart mathematicians/scientists/engineers are even talking about it. But, us humans like to anthropomorphize everything so I guess computing machines are ripe for that. So I have read many times. And I'm sure it's true.
It fascinates me though that almost dead languages have made huge comebacks in my lifetime. Over there in Wales the Welsh language made a resurgence. So much so that Welsh, in 2011, became the only officially recognized language in Great Britain. One can demand that the government communicates in Welsh and they have to do that. English does not have that status. Strange but true.
Similarly in Ireland Gaelic is very prominent.
I wouldn't worry too much about what you don't understand about linguistics and semantics, or human psychology.
Obviously, the languages of some societies and cultures are beyond you... we all tend to be self-limiting in this way.... some of us more so than others. Personally, I will skip the Welsh, Gaelic, and Swahili.
Nonetheless, lawyers, doctors, and even computer geeks have their own that others find unnecessary to learn. After all they have their own societies and cultures that seeks out conventions of communication.
With language, it is somewhat a mystery that we communicate at all. Cleverness alone and being logical is not enough to glean the actual meaning of a message. But a true language is how we communicate without the need for technology and all the formalisms. It is a significant component a sociological part of human life where we establish human relationships and systems of belief.
Let's just say that computers, microprocessors, and microcontrollers require a scheme to be assigned a task or many tasks, and such a scheme is referred to as a program that is commonly referred to as being represented via a computer language. That remains the purpose for which a computer language is intended, a regime of symbolic representation to be applied to a machine. The context is limited and will never be inclusive of the whole human experience.
I have yet to see a computer language that asserts a phonology as a formal part of its language specification for coding a program, or to fully document itself in its own language specification just to perfect communication in its own language. And yet, linguistics is defined as being inclusive of semantics, grammar, and phonology. Where exactly does a computer language fit into the study of linguistics?
Even programmers revert to their native languages when they collaborate about code or algorithm. I don't see anyone here that completely avoids English and relies solely on PBasic, Spin, or even GCC. And I happen to feel that will never happen.
When you get out of bed in the morning, do you immediately ponder what to do in GCC? And do you dream in Python or Java Script? Do you kiss your wife and say "main()...."
True languages just might be the prime infinite loop, and the balance is of our own ego defining the world as we personally prefer.
So, as a person deeply interested in computer programming as well as human languages, I don't think they are very similar. Not really. The learning process is just so vastly different.
-Tor
WYSIWYG -- Even Linux has not been able to stay completely logical. The jump from Ver 2.6 to Ver 3.0 seems to have been a brainwave inspired by celebration of an anniversary.
The problem with real languages are that we all learn the word 'language' and then spend a lifetime attempting to reconcile the meaning of that word. Since it is in the very nature of any language to change over time, trying to tie down a meaningful definition for all times and all situation is next to impossible. On top of that, vocabulary keeps expanding over one's entire life with dictionaries that never are able to contain it all.
On the other hand, learning C or PBasic hands me a short list of defined words, and some specific rules on syntax that can be easily kept in a reference book.
it is all very mysterious how one learns a natural language or how one acquires a meaningful message from a few utterances. But we seem to do it, and are able to debate with passion, express feelings, and amuse ourselves with paradoxes. A computer language will just freeze up and issue a diagnostic, but humans babble on and on.
Face the reality that in the history of computers, there was a period of rapid expansion where many many greedy fools tried to launch their own language to create a franchise that would bring them enormous wealth. Only a few prevailed, and only a few will endure.
It is all similar to breeding cockroaches. You start out with one female that lays a million or so eggs, and you merely get a few thousand... which are more than enough.[/QUOTE]
I agree there was a period of rapid expansion of computer languages, but I doubt greed was the reason for launching most of them. Ego (“I can create a better language than that.”) and adding functionality for specific application areas were more likely motives. Two early projects I am familiar with were examples of that.
The first was creating a macro language for performing financial calculations and text processing. Done strictly to provide the functionality needed for an order entry and billing application.
The second was OPL (Our Programming Language). An actual compiled language created in part for it's functionality, and partly for corporate bragging rights.
I agree, there is not much similarity between computer and human languages. Computer languages are more logical and rigidly defined, although not completely logical. Human languages, and English in particular, have poorly defined structures and rules. One only has to listen to young children as they are learning to speak to find examples of that. At that age I often told my kids to be good, be nice, or behave, and one day one of them answered “ we are being haved”. A perfectly logical extrapolation, yet not proper English.
Up to a point, I enjoy learning computer languages for their compactness of purpose and use. It is much like studying a branch of mathematics or engineering. It seems such compact topics appeal to males; while females actually find learning true languages easier and more interesting.
For me, learning Chinese may actually have required me to patiently await physical changes in the brain while I endless apply effort to comprehend both the phonology and the character-based lexicon. After nearly 20 years immerses in Taiwan culture, I seem to have begun to feel some forward progress.
Still, nothing ventured... nothing gained. It would be hard to explain all that I have enjoyed learning from microcontrollers or from learning Chinese. Life would be rather dull without a few open-ended projects that challenge one to see more of what others are seeing or trying to achieve.
I am NOT heavily invested in a true language being something that a computer language can never be. It is just a working hypothesis based on teaching English to Taiwanese and learning Chinese.
Lingusitics is world often ignored by techies. And yet, just reading a good book on semantics it can be a real eye-opener that might start a life long journey of discovery.