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Forum URL: http://www.eyrie-productions.com/Forum/dcboard.cgi
Forum Name: Undocumented Features General
Topic ID: 92
Message ID: 14
#14, RE: Standard language?
Posted by Pasha on Sep-01-01 at 03:35 PM
In response to message #12
>I cannot make any sense out of that. The redundancy actually makes it
>*harder* to learn -- English is one of the most idiomatic languages
>around, surpassed only by Japanese and Chinese to my knowledge, and
>there's four or five substantial variations that see a fair amount of
>use. (An Australian who speaks with a great deal of Australian slang
>will probably sound like he's speaking a foreign language.)

Yes, but once learned, the redundancy is useful. I can understand someone who is speaking USsouthern, AustrailianGen, BritishGen, MerkinGen, and very heavily accented english with realitive ease, minus local slang (I can't *read* scots, but I can understand it spoken). And I can grab that from context. However, when speaking to someone from Puerto Rico, or just about anywhere in South America, I can hardly understand them, and they can barely understand me. But speaking to people from mexico, or those who speak USmexican, I can speak almost as well as I speak english. I know one guy who grew up in Paris. And couldn't speak with the locals when he went elsewhere in the country. So that kinda flubs that. I don't speak esperanto, just because, well, I don't see a use for it. I speak languages that are useful to me in everyday life. 'MerkinGen and USmex. I'd like to learn japanese, but I doubt that happening unless I decide to take in Uni.

>>I could also point to lojban, which is the only language that I know
>>that can express time travel, from the third person after the fact,
>>without breaking down into tears. And it's just fun to speak a
>>language that looks like code when written out. Hey! There's an idea!
>>we'll all use some bastardized version of Perl to communicate in the
>>future! Yeah!
>
>Um. Lojban is painful to learn and speak. While it's certainly
>interesting as an intellectual exercise, it's nigh-useless for
>anything else.

So? I think that Hawiian is painful to learn and speak...It's still used frequently in hawaii...If you grew up speaking it, it wouldn't be painful to learn, you'd just pick it up. And speaking it, well, same thing. You would have nothing to compare to.

>As for Perl...
>Random Usenet Poster: "That's not encrypted. That's in Perl."
>Larry Wall: "You just contradicted yourself."
>
>I like Perl. I intend to learn Perl. But it's not exactly the
>easiest language to figure out just by looking at code.

That's why I said basterdized. Not only that, but the main reason that perl is so nasty is that you can do some really screwy things with it, and it's just sort of given that you will do screwy things with it, if at all possible.


--
-Pasha
Umm, right....I'll be with you in just a sec now...