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Re: Language superiority, improvement, etc.

From:David G. Durand <dgd@...>
Date:Friday, October 16, 1998, 2:26
>On Thu, 15 Oct 1998, charles <catty@...> wrote: >We will get nowhere with these inappropriate analogies.
Frankly, I think this discussion is getting nowhere. We can probably optimize a lanaguage for any definable and testable property that a language can have, but are unlikely to secure general agreement as to what forms of "optimization" are worth carrying out. Some perennial topics of this sort on CONLANG are self-segregating morphology (trade off of coding efficiency and word-form rigidity against machine parsing ease, and arguably human parsing ease), compression (huffman-style minimal encodings can increase the bandwidth of speech, but trade off redundancy and intelligibility in noisy environments), semantic relations (philosophical-style taxonomic vocabularies make finding the word for a thing easy -- as long as we can agree that the ontology is correct, and it doesn't need to be revised), and derivational flexibility (starting with verbs (or nouns) one can derive many vocabulary items by means of regular derivational functions). These are all attractive to some and useless or foolish to others. None has secured universal acclaim from all. Some aspects of language in use are fairly limited however: The complexity of possible human thoughts probably has an upper bound, and that bound seems to be met by language in most cases (possible/probably exceptions in the arts and mystical experience are noted). The complexity of human brains (and thus the languages they can understand and produce actively) are limited. The fact that languages all satisfy the design criteria of being usable by humans, and adequate to express human thoughts seems to make comparisons silly, if not invidious. Human communication all has recourse to meta-linguistic functions that let us define new words, use analogies, and so forth, thus extending our linguistic systems on the fly.
>Language when seen as a tool is obviously improvable, >and some features are better or worse, and overall utility >is more or less, according to the user's priorities.
Right. Superior and inferior imply a universal standard. I won't claim that such a thing couldn't exist in some world, but I see no evidence that even any one linguistic micro-point of potential evaluation has secured any agreement even in this small group, never mind the kind of global evaluation that would be required to judge whole languages against one another.
>A better analogy is a car or programming language. >Sure, you can do almost anything in Fortran or a Turing >machine, but it would be silly to say all such >languages are equally good.
Depends on the application. For proving certain kinds of theorem, Turing machines are ideal, because they are so simple (and yet powerful). For numerical programming, Fortran has had practical advantages for decades because social effects reinforced a situation where the best numerical libraries and optimizing compilers for numerical programming were both Fortran related. Similar tradeoffs explain why so many other programming languages exist. In Goedel, Escher, Bach, Doug Hofstadter defines a programming language that generates only the recursive functions (not Turing complete). He notes how _hard_ it was to define an even remotely useful-seeming language that was _not_ Turing complete.
> And you can ride a donkey, >but horses are demonstrably *better*.
Not on a mountain trail, where a donkey's smaller size, toughhess, and balance make it more effective.
>As for natlangs, over time they must tend to a common, >rough equality of overall usefulness, for reasons far >beyond the scope of my laziness to even attempt to detail. >Lexicon can expand at will. Grammar can be a mess though, >and if one were to search for the "best" inter-language, >some would serve better than others depending on criteria. >It is unlikely that we or anybody else will agree on >any criteria, though. So all our languages are safe ...
In the absence of any evidence that such criteria even exist, talk of "optimizations" is a waste of time, without a clear definition of the basis of measurement. Personally, I think we may have reached closure in the sense that no opinions are being changed, and the positions are very clear. -- David _________________________________________ David Durand dgd@cs.bu.edu \ david@dynamicDiagrams.com Boston University Computer Science \ Sr. Analyst http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/ \ Dynamic Diagrams --------------------------------------------\ http://www.dynamicDiagrams.com/ MAPA: mapping for the WWW \__________________________