On Wednesday, 22 January 2014 at 18:46:06 UTC, Walter Bright
wrote:
On 1/22/2014 3:40 AM, Chris wrote:
Syntax is getting simplified due to the fact that the listener
"knows what we
mean", e.g. "buy one get one free". I wonder to what extent
languages will be
simplified one day. But this is a topic for a whole book ...
There was this article recently:
http://www.onthemedia.org/story/yesterday-internet-solved-20-year-old-mystery/
about how english is so redundant one can write sentences using
just the first letter of each word, and it is actually
understandable.
These examples are more about context than redundancy in the
grammar. This is very interesting, because the burden is more and
more on the listener and less on the speaker. The speaker can
omit things relying on the listener's common sense or knowledge
of the world (or "you know what I mean" skills). In the
beginning, languages were quite complicated (8 or more cases,
inflections), but over the centuries things have been simplified,
probably due to the fact that humans are experienced enough and
can now trust the "interpreter" in the listener's head.
A good example are headlines. A classic is "Driver refused
license". Now, everybody will assume that it was not the driver
who refused the license (default assumption or the _unmarked
case_). If it were in fact the driver who refused the license,
the headline would have been different, some sort of linguistic
flag would have been raised. This goes into the realms of
pragmatics, a very interesting discipline. Some of the concepts
found in natural languages can also be found in programming
languages. I find it extremely interesting how the human mind
(not just language) is reflected in programming languages.
