Language comparison
| From: | Sai Emrys <saizai@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, January 5, 2005, 9:56 |
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This was inspired by this essay - http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html .
My hypothesis: some human languages are better than others.
I will grant that all sufficiently advanced (i.e., everything at least
creole-grade) languages are Turing-complete and thus of equal
theoretical expressive power, for one, and that for two they all meet
<i>sufficiency</i> requirements of their users. (Although in the
latter case, I think there is a certain amount of self-limiting
factor, in that people do not often conceive of requirements they'd
want that their language does not fulfill.)
This, BTW, is pretty much flatly rejected by modern linguistics as I
understand it. I think it's critical to a conlanger, however - just as
it is to a programmer or language-designer in the link above - and it
is an underlying axiom of my ODIL essay.
Opinions?
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