Donna Y [email protected]
> On Oct 19, 2018, at 1:39 PM, Ian Clark <[email protected]> wrote: > > For Dr XXY, English is a second language. One of many. His first language > has never been studied, let alone learnt, by an outsider: it is spoken by > hardly anyone outside his village, but they've all saved up to send him to > Harvard. I was reminded of a language I as introduced to when studying Linguistics— Lusi was spoken by only about 1000 people in Papua New Guinea. Lusi is a simple language in the sense that a Pidgin (a lingua franca to communicate between speakers of other languages) and Creole (a language that originated as a mixed language) languages are simple--structurally simple. There are no exceptions to the rules. There is a smaller lexicon. Languages are said to become progressively simpler as they approach the ideal of a one-to-one correspondence between form and meaning. A well-designed computer language is unambiguous but all known natural languages exhibit the property of ambiguity. Tok Pisin developed post European contact and is an English-based creole—in a land of more than 500 mutually unintelligible languages Tok Pisin became an official language of PNG One thing that makes APL simple is a consistent syntax. J was designed as a simplified, more elegant version of APL. You can learn a small subset of APL or J that serves your need without mastering the entire language. English and other native languages develop all kinds of complexities and yet a child can master them--babies are voracious statistical learning machines. Your friend wants to learn more English to be able to discuss particle physics and cosmology at Harvard. See: Roberto Trotta, an astrophysicist, tells the history of the universe using only one thousand most-used words in the English language in a book called "The Edge Of The Sky.". > Big ideas don’t always need big words > > Roberto Trotta: "The Edge of Sky" | Talks at Google > > http://robertotrotta.com <http://robertotrotta.com/> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
