jbv wrote "I hope I won't trigger any flame war"
OOH, Goody, Goody, Goody, Let's have a flame war! Frankly, I wear
long-trousers nowadays, so prefer civilized discussion :)
"no human language exists per se in nature. no human language popped-up out of
nowhere."
I feel I may be hanged for something I didn't write :) I did not state that
human languages popped out of nowhere:-
[Maybe they were breathed out of the nostrils of Lord Brahma at the start of
the Maha Kalpa ???]
I stated that they were not DESIGNED (excluding Esperanto and "value-pack"),
but EVOLVED.
I know that good folks like Jonathan Swift tried to set up an English Academy
to manipulate English;
I am also aware of the foul murder of the circonflex by l'Academie Francaise
and the destruction
of the male gender in Nederlaans and Vlaams. Here in Bulgaria, the communists
managed to castrate
the Bulgarian alphabet in such a way as to alter the way many words are
pronounced.
As an EFL teacher I am acutely conscious, on a daily basis, of the ongoing
tension between
Prescriptivism and "How English Is Spoke". But humans love mucking around with
things that have
developed naturally.
However, xTalk's "seed" was "breathed out of the nostrils" of Bill Atkinson and
his chums. Subsequently
people working with SuperCard, MetaCard and RR have altered and augmented
HyperTalk, and a variety
of "dialects" have arisen.
-----------------------------------------
The main thrust of my previous message was not to point out the above (which
should be fairly obvious!),
BUT to point out that the global extension of the "Computer = Human" metaphor
is rather destructive; and
that there might be a dangerous tendency associated with it insofar as an
"English-like" computer language
could give the impression that one was having a 'chat' with a computer, rather
than programming it.
Humans, unlike computers, can interpret things. Computers, unlike humans, do
exactly what you instruct them to do. Phrases such as "the computer does not
understand me" are simply anthropomorphisms.
----------------------------------------
Sorry, Flame War is OFF!
sincerely, Richmond Mathewson
____________________________________________________________
"Philosophical problems are confusions arising owing to the fluidity of
meanings users attach to words and phrases."
Mathewson, 2006
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