On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 10:32 PM, wren ng thornton <wren@freegeek.org> wrote:

Both of these conclusions seem quite natural to me, even from before learning Haskell. It seems, therefore, that "naturality" is not the proper metric to discuss. It's oft overlooked, but the fact is that expressivity comes not from more formal power, but from _less_.

* Natural language has a limited range of words and syntactic constructs, but gives the larger-enough building blocks to enable unconstrained communication; whereas a language with a unique word for every utterance (arguably simpler) is impossible to learn.

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 example, has exactly 1 pronunciation for each "alphabet letter". Hence you'll never find words in English like "lead" and "lead", where the first means to guide someone or something, or to give direction, and the second is a chemical element. Words that are spelled the same in Japanese are pronounced the same 100% of the time. Furthermore, I find that you are far more limited in your choices of how to form ideas into sentences. In English there might be 20 different ways to phrase the exact same sentence for use in a certain context, where the sentences end up being almost identical with the exception of 1 or 2 words changed or shuffled around. In Japanese there would probably be far fewer. In Vietnamese there's a similar problem, in that there are not very many synonyms at all, and NO conjugations. It is complicated by the fact that it's a tonal language, but on the other hand the tonality independent of the expressivity in my experience. Similar to Chinese, although I can't speak for the expressivity of Chinese I would not be surprised at all if written Chinese was extremely expressive, but spoken not so much.

Anyway the point of all this is that in English you have more freedom and more power, and hence you use (abuse?) the syntax of the language to create words, sentences, and phrases that express very powerful things. Furthermore, they are things that almost all English speakers would be able to grasp the full meaning of what you've said.