On Wednesday, 8 January 2014 at 20:21:22 UTC, John Carter wrote:
> Very well written, a pleasure to read.

And very hard to translate! :)

Leaping off the immediate topic of computer language D into the realm
of human languages English and Turkish...

With the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis in the back of my mind...

What makes it harder to translate?

Is there a human language in which these concepts would be more easily
discussed?

I was always fascinated by early translations (1980 and before era) of
Japanese machine manuals... It was tempting to find the
mistranslations funny, until I realised...

* You could never remember the words. Your memory is fundamentally governed by the language you speak. Thus when you try remember (and relate to a colleague) a subtly garbled chunk of that language, your
brain autocorrects it and refuses to reproduce the mistakes!

* The differences indicated curious and subtle differences in thought processes of the original authors and translators. Not better or worse
processes. Different. Interesting. Subtle.

* The categories of mistakes made by, say German German to English
translators, were very different.

So I have always been fascinated by Sapir-Whorf, but it seems to be
very subtle and nuanced and unexpected in practical effect.


On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 8:26 AM, Ali Çehreli <acehr...@yahoo.com> wrote:
On 01/08/2014 11:09 AM, Paolo Invernizzi wrote:

This one is a good introduction, or at least the best one I can remember:

http://klickverbot.at/blog/2012/05/purity-in-d/

Very well written, a pleasure to read.

And very hard to translate! :) In case a Turkish reader is interested, here
is the translation:

  http://ddili.org/makale/saflik.html

Ali

On a small tangent, I believe the Sapir-Whorf thesis has been disproved. However, I definitely think there might be a similar effect of programming languages on programmers.

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