On Monday 12 October 2009 23:22:29 Grant Edwards wrote: > On 2009-10-12, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckin...@gmail.com> wrote:
[snip] > > "The boy kicked the ball." The subject is boy and the only way > > to tell is the it's before the verb. Which is a stupid idea > > actually. > > It's probably just a result of my having grown up with a > positional verses notational language (is notational the right > word?), but the positional syntax seems a lot simpler to me. Let's assume "notational" is a word, I know what you mean. If it's not a word, we just made it one :-) I fully understand where you're coming from, English is my native tongue too, and I deal with positionality (is that a word?) fluently. But I also see it's flaws, some of them are quite gross. You have no way to denote emphasis other than by saying so or using modified font glyphs; in a compound sentence using an unqualified pronoun is usually ambiguous. Example: Joe went to school with Bill and he passed his classes. Joe went to school with Bill, and he passed his classes. Who does "he" refer to in both? I'll bet there's some complex rule that does define the convention, and I'll also bet very few people know what it is. [snip] > > You should be able to modify "ball" to show that it's indeed > > the object. > > That seems to be an entirely "subjective" value judgement. Why > should one be able to do that? [Good pun, eh?] Yup, good pun :-) Change what I said to "I think it would be a good idea to modify "ball"" > > Then you could do this: "ball the boy kicked" which emphasises > > that it's the ball that was kicked. > > I give up, why doesn't "the ball the boy kicked" work? If I tell you "ball" is the objective case and "the boy" is the subjective case, can you see where I'm going? It's still the boy that kicked the ball but the position denotes emphasis, not case. If English could do this (it can't) I would have added information and retained full precision. As a geek, I can see the attraction of this. But as a user of the language, I can see I have zero chance of it ever happening [snip] > > Like I said earlier in this thread, if English were a coding > > language it would be BrainFuck or intercal > > Don't pretty much all programming languages use position to > differente the meanings of references to variables? Hmmm, yes they do. But they have no need to change the order - there's no extra information you could convey by doing that (with current languages at least). Human languages have different needs in this regard. > OK, this is waaay off topic now... yes, you are right about that too :-) -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
