May 26, 2008

Spoken Languages, Blub, and Convenience

I think we can suggest that a fairly clear power hierarchy exists between modern Italian and Latin. Italian greatly resembles Latin, except it has lost many of the tenses and complexities of Latin. Just as Lisp’s tragic history of losing to its less powerful successors to its ideas, Latin’s structure and grammatical depth have given way to its less potent children (the Romance languages).

Perfect example of Ignorant Non-expert With a Blog (tm).

No, the Romance languages aren’t impotent compared to Latin. Italian speakers don’t struggle any more with expressing themselves than did Latin speakers. That Italian speakers and Latin speakers might use different means to express what they want to express, and even that they might actually not want to express all the same things, is apparently too advanced a thought for this guy.

Computer languages are designed, so you can design them do be difficult to use for humans. But human languages evolve, and they die off or evolve if they are too difficult to use for its speakers for whatever purposed they have. Also, no “simple” language has ever been found: the superficially “simple” languages turn out to compensate by complexity in other areas.

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Daily Meh is written and edited by Simen (contact me). I live in Norway. This blog is about whatever interests me. Here are some of my favorite posts from the archives. You can subscribe via RSS.