Re: OT: PL/I was Re: Please welcome . . .

On Thursday 18 December 2003 10:29 am, Mark J. Reed wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 09:47:56AM -0800, Gary Shannon wrote:
> > An interesting idea.  I did try, about 3 or 4 years
> > ago, to design an RPN (Reverse Polish Notation)
> > conlang inspired by the Forth programming language.
>
> There is an alien conlang that operates on this principle, although
> its name escapes me.  Interesting cultural notes about politicians
> pushing a word and then forgetting about it until the end of their
> speech when it changes the whole meaning of what they were saying, etc.
> Comments about humans generally being unable to speak the language in
> real time because we can't keep a deep enough mental stack.
>
> I have also played with this concept; in some of my proto-conlangs
> RPN was a sort of stealth feature of the grammar, lying underneath it all
> but not included in the descriptions, which just couched things in normal
> grammarspeak about postpositions, SOV, etc.
>
> I even tried to create "RPNglish" once, but there are too many English
> words that are ambiguous as to part of speech, and getting the
> wrong part of speech in an RPN language can really screw up your
> stack. :)
>
> -Mark
>
>
I have long maintained that Japanese grammar is essentially Spanish done in
RPN. (My Japanese instructor, who had a science background, found that very
amusing.)
--
Elyse Grasso

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