[Haskell-cafe] [OT] Japanese (was: Re: about Haskell code written to be "too smart")

Zachary Turner wrote:

On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 10:32 PM, wren ng thornton 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.

That's funny, I find Japanese to be far more expressive than English. (The language itself. Due to familiarity, I myself am more expressive in English.) Japanese has sophisticated forms of address that indicate the distance, degree, and style of the speaker's relationship with the listener. In English we can get the point across but we don't have the formalism and so it's all a lot more handwaving. Japanese can indicate topic and focus directly; whereas English must resort to bold/italics or syntactic contortions to be precise. Japanese has a wide assortment of pronouns which imply measures of respect, arrogance, disdain, abashment, etc; whereas English is limited to a small number that are only deictic. Japanese has many postpositions which capture abstract comparative relations that are difficult to express concisely in English. Japanese sentential particles can express a wide range of affect; whereas English must rely on intonation and context to determine whether something should be interpreted as compassionate, bonding, insulting, ironic, etc. Of course it all depends on what exactly you care to express. Japanese has restricted phonology, as you mentioned, though this is only as meaningful as the character set used for variable names in a programming language. Japanese also lacks certain sophisticated distinctions in English like definite vs indefinite articles, and singular vs plural vs mass-count nouns.

Words that are spelled the same in Japanese are pronounced the same 100% of the time.

False. There are numerous words which have the same spelling and different pronunciations. For example 今日 can be either /kyou/ "today" or /kon'niti/ "every day; daily". This is one reason why learning to read Japanese is so difficult for westerners. An even bigger reason is that countless words can be spelled in a number of different ways, with each spelling having different nuances and implications (sometimes to the point where the spellings are not interchangeable).

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.

All natural languages are Thinking-complete. Just like with Turing-complete programming languages, the only difference is where they hide the bodies. There are plenty of things that I as a native speaker of English could say which other natives would grasp but which would confuse many of my non-native yet fluent coworkers. The Japanese abuse their syntax just as badly as we abuse English, or far far worse if we include the slang of youth culture. The Japanese have long thought of their language as a toy box ripe for experimentation, and you can see the effects of this everywhere. -- Live well, ~wren