The case for Turkish is stronger than that
of Latin!
In Turkish:-
There are no agreements (in number or
gender - there is no gender or noun
classes);
All verbs are regular, vowel harmonies are regular. Word order is well
defined and highly agglutinated.
And as a bonus the latinised script is almost perfectly phonetical.
Nick Dyson
School of Computing
Staffordshire Univwersity
On 06 Sep 2000 09:15:35 +1100 Julian Assange
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> Monash
> University
> School of Computer Science and
> Software Engineering
> 2000 Clayton
> campus Seminar Series
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Seminar:
>
> Programming in Latin (and Why You Really
> Might Want To)
>
> Speaker:
>
> Dr Damian Conway
>
> ([EMAIL PROTECTED]),
> School of Computer Science and
> Software Engineering,
> Monash University
>
>
>
> Date:
> MONDAY, 11 September 2000
>
> Time:
> 2:00 pm
>
> Venue:
>
>
> Room 135, Computer Science Building (26),
> Clayton Campus
>
> Video Wall at Caulfield Campus
>
>
> Seminar Abstract:
>
>
> English has a comparatively weak lexical
> structure. Much of the
> grammatical load of a sentence is carried
> by positional cues. A
> statement such as: "The boy gave the dog
> the food." only makes sense
> because of the convention that the subject
> precedes the verb, which
> precedes the indirect object, which
> precedes the direct object. Changing
> the order -- "The food gave the boy the
> dog." -- changes the meaning.
>
> Most programming languages use similar
> positional grammatical cues.
> The instruction:
>
> maximum = next;
>
> is very different in meaning from:
>
> next = maximum;
>
> Generally speaking, older languages have
> richer lexical structures (such
> as inflection for noun number and case)
> and so rely less on word order.
> For example, in Latin the sentences "Puer
> dedit cani escam." and "Escam
> dedit puer cani." both mean "The boy gave
> the dog the food." Indeed, the
> more usual word order would be "Reverse
> Polish", with the verb coming
> last: "Puer cani escam dedit." This
> flexibility is possible because
> Latin uses inflection to denote lexical
> roles.
>
> There is no reason that programming
> languages could not also make use of
> inflection, rather than position, to
> denote lexical roles. This talk
> will describe an alternative syntactic
> binding for the Perl programming
> language. This binding uses inflections
> based on classical Latin
> grammar, rather than positional
> constraints.
>
> No prior knowledge of Latin will be
> assumed, but by the end of the talk
> the following program will make perfect
> sense:
>
>
> <pre>
> maximum inquementum tum biguttam tum
> stadium egresso scribe.
> vestibulo perlegementum da meo maximo
> .
> maximum tum novumversum egresso
> scribe.
> da duo tum maximum conscribementa meis
> listis.
> dum damentum nexto listis
> decapitamentum fac sic
> lista sic hoc tum nextum
> recidementum cis vannementa listis da.
> next tum biguttam tum nextum tum
> novumversum scribe egresso.
> cis
> </pre>
>
>
> About The Speaker:
>
> Dr Damian Conway is a Senior Lecture in
> the School of Computer Science
> and Software Engineering at Monash
> University.
>
> His research interests include: language
> design, the teaching of
> programming, object orientation, software
> engineering, natural language
> generation, synthetic language generation,
> morphing, human-computer
> interaction, geometric modelling, the
> psychophysics of perception,
> nanoscale simulation, and parsing.
>
>
> School Contact:
> Damian Conway
>
> ([EMAIL PROTECTED] )
>
>
> -
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> A complete list of forthcoming Monash
> (Clayton) Computer Science and Software
> Engineering seminars is available from:
>
> http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin/seminar?forthcoming
>
> Clayton campus parking information is
> available from:
>
> http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin/seminar?parking
>
> -
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Andrew P. Paplinski (seminar coordinator)
> ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
>
> -
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Updated: 05 Sep 2000
>
