2009/3/25 Zachary Turner <divisorthe...@gmail.com>: > > On the other hand, -certain- languages are more expressive than others. As > an example, I personally find English far more expressive than both > Vietnamese and Japanese, yet English is far more complicated. Japanese, for
Way off topic, but for what it's worth, you can take it as axiomatic that all natural languages are equally expressive, qua languages. They're also equally easy/hard overall. The areas of difficulty are just in different places. Japanese grammar is extraordinarily simple, but achieving mastery of the spoken language *in Japanese society* is next to impossible, because usage reflects social constructions. As you no doubt know, what is not said is sometimes just as expressive as what is said in Japanese; very maddening to a logorrheic American, just as an English speaker's need to explicitly articulate *everything* is no doubt annoying to Japanese. Regarding spelling and phonology: the idea that "one symbol, one sound" is somehow optimal is the Myth That Will Not Die. None other than Chomsky himself argued that English orthography is near-optimal for the English language. All writing systems are designed to serve speakers of the language, and many languages are poorly modeled by a one symbol, one sound system. I'm not sure there's a lesson there for formal language designers and programmers, except maybe that the expressiveness (elegance?) of a text usually depends to a great extent on the writer more than the language. -g _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe