Erik Price [EMAIL PROTECTED] quoth: *> *>I'm not a linguistic scholar, but I read once that linguistic scholars *>have noticed that throughout human history, there has always been a *>trend of languages diverging, rather than converging (as one might *>expect). As the amount of widespread-edness* of a language grows, the *>more likely that subgroups using the language are to evolve with their *>own dialects of that language, separating from the main "trunk" as it *>were. I wonder sometimes about the grammars that people use to write *>software and how closely or not so closely it relates.
I'm merely an armchair linguist and enthusiast but my point was as far from the technical as you can get without coming back round the backside. Imagine yourself arriving somewhere your native language and any other language you may speak/read with any efficiency are mostly, if not completely, useless. Convergence, divergence, liguistic highbrow are of little use in this context as your goal is to communicate not to compare. Finnish is radically different than the I-E family of languages so until you know both of them comparison is simply not possible. Neither English nor Finnish were consciously designed by one or more people looking for the most efficient method of communicating meaning which can be seen as a bug or a feature depending on your perspective. Yet in spite of their complexity millions of people use and change the languages daily. People spend far too much angst on comparing perl5 to what is emerging in the perl6 apocalypses as it isn't very productive to find meaning in one language by looking through another especially when the new language has yet to be in use. Finnish has no gender, no future tense, no articles, and a host of locative cases and postpositions which make translation a source of frustration as communicating something in Finnish is quite a different construct than its English equivalent. When you accept rather than compare it becomes far easier to see the logic and get on with it. P6 is circumventing the slower method of natural change in language but, look on the bright side, it's not going to be Finnish :) As far as human and computer language grammars go you should read Larry's natural language bits; http://www.wall.org/~larry/natural.html and http://www.techgnosis.com/wall1.html e. _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
