nickb / fnord.io.com (Nick Bensema) wrote:
[...]
>Whether we like it or not, English has become the unofficial official
>language of all sorts of things, including programming.  I like it
>because it's convenient to me, but I also regret both that Americans
>have another excuse to forget that other languages exist, and that
>English is such a difficult language.  A Japanese person learning
>English, for example, not only has to learn the Western way of
>expressing oneself, but also all this grammatical and orthographic
>mess that we've accumulated through successive invasions of England.
[...]

OK, this is going to be seriously OT, though I find
it interesting.  If that doesn't sound interesting to
you, it is best to stop here... :-)

Anyone who doubts that English is hard should try to
read http://home.hetnet.nl/~redfern/chaos.html aloud
(though probably in private).

However about English grammar.  Would you prefer to
have to deal with 5 genders?  Old English had strong
masculine, weak masculine, neuter, weak feminine and
strong feminine.  For instance a man would be strong
masculine, and a girl weak feminine.  As for spelling,
I have to agree.  It is unfortunate that spelling was
regularized during a time when it was in flux.

But still while the French influence has resulted in
some interesting features (what do cows and beef
have to do with each other?) I suspect that overall
it has had a simplifying influence on our grammar.

Not that this particularly helps in the current
situation.

BTW an interesting note.  A lot of programming
is English affected in ways we don't even see.
The full extent of this was driven home to me by
Damian Conway in a talk where he explained how
he tried to map Perl onto a subset of Latin.
English (and therefore virtually all programming
languages) is positional.  "The boy gave the dog
the food." means something totally different than
"The dog gave the boy the food."  By contrast
Latin is an inflected language, the ending of the
word indicates the grammatical role.  "Puer dedit
cani escam." means exactly what "Escam dedit puer
cani."  And in fact would normally be said, "Puer
cani escam dedit."

Now stop and think about all of that you have seen
about parsing.  Virtually all of the theory is
about how you parse languages where the order of
the words matters, the entire idea of parsing an
inflected language is *ignored*!

People interested in full details and explanation
should read
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html
which includes a brief explanation of the parsing
techniques he came up with for handling an inflected
language.  It is worth reflecting how much different
programming would be today if, for instance, Germany
had retained its scientific pre-eminence and set the
de facto standard for programming...(German is also
an inflected language also.)

Cheers,
Ben
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