On Fri, Dec 26, 2003 at 06:56:44PM +0800, Bryan wrote:
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> Hi,
> I was just wondering, why has there been no initiatives/attempts to
> produce a standard/universal (synthetic) written language for
> programmers in general and hackers (not crackers) in particular? (or
> has there?)
Yes. It's called English. :) Every serious hacker of note speaks
English to a greater or lesser degree, as it's the lingua franca of the
Internet.
>
> I personally like it to be like the Chinese written language, because as Mr.
> Larry Wall states in his article ("Diligence, Patience and Humility", Open
> Sources:Voices from the Open Source Revolution ,1st ed.), it is a portable
> language....It's kind of like, Sun's JAVA, Perl, Python,etc.
>
> eg.
> a mandarin speaking person writes a letter to his fokien speaking
> friend,when the letter arrives his friend will be able to read it even
> though they both speak two different spoken languages/dialect.
>
This isn't quite true. Read this article:
http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/east_asian_languages.html
for an analysis of this phenomenon that you describe. In no way do
Chinese characters provide the kind of "portability" or "machine
independence" close to even that provided by the JVM system for computer
languages. Excerpt:
By the same token, the "unity" that Chinese characters allegedly
impart to the language by allowing speakers of different "dialects"
to read a common written language turns out to be an illusion. These
so-called Chinese dialects have less in common than the Romance
languages of Europe, meaning that speakers of nonstandard Chinese
(some 30 percent of the Han population) are not reading their own
language or even a common language, but what is to them a
Mandarin-based second language written in Chinese characters. Granted
the characters allow non-Mandarin speakers to read segments of written
Mandarin in their own regional pronunciations. But, far from unifying
Chinese, this practice only perpetuates differences that would have
been leveled out long ago under the influence of a phonetic script.
-- "Asia's Orthographic Dilemma," Wm. C. Hannas
> Just imagine Openpensource/FS documentation written in a language that can
> just be read out in Chinese---Fokien, Cantonese, Mandarin,etc--- , English,
> French, Filipino---Tagalog, Cebuano,etc--- , Spanish, Russian, German, Greek,
> Arabic, etc.
>
Certainly impossible. The languages you mention cover the entire world,
and all of them are so grammatically dissimilar as to render any
idealized language you might invent impossible. You'll find that the
language you're proposing cannot help but become a full blown artificial
language in and of itself, because you'll inevitably write about real
world things because that's what software's designed to interact with,
and your documentation will inevitably cover it. Talk to Dr. Ludovic
Lazarus Zamenhof if you want some idea of the scale of what it is you're
proposing.
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