Good point, since I think that some concepts from linguistics can be carried over to computer languages and vice versa. The central dogma of Chomskyism ( which is ~ linguistics, at least in the US) was (roughly) that all languages are equivalent, hence linguistic relativism was BS. This approach has been shattered recently by quite a few people, I think one of the most well known is Lera Boroditsky (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lera_Boroditsky). Luckily, CS people (and the like) never had their minds warped by this paradigm so have always been free to discuss "which language to expand the (programming) mind".
My rant done, let me produce my list:
* Ancient Greek (or Latin) - inflectional: Just sheer coolness of it and the literature you can read in the original is enough. But these languages are the grand daddies of Indo-European (unless you wanna go Hittite or Lithuanian) grammar and will teach you valuable linguistic and conceptual points (i.e. cases, noun declension). Learning this is like learning ALGOL, kind of useless but you'll see where a lot of concepts have originated from.
* Mandarin (i.e. Chinese) - isolating: Two points: Seeing the syntaxlessness of these languages is mind boggling and expanding experience. Many poet/translators have remarked about the "timelessness" of Chinese poetry, because verbs don't have tense markings. And, of course, the writing system is very interesting, too. Like learning Lisp (Scheme), an interesting, expanding experience.
* Turkish - agglutinative: (Disclaimer, I'm a native speaker) A great into to the agglutinative aspect of languages (unless you want to learn an American-Indian language) and an interesting phonetic system, so regular, is used as an example a lot in phonology courses.
I'll add for Chinese that tonality in pronunciation is rather mind-opening in practice. It doesn't have an obvious symbolic attachment, but it does lead to moments of awe as you realize you're tracking and paying attention to someone's word-by-word tonality in other languages.
I'll also add Chinese's rather powerful "de" statement. It can be possessively and descriptively, but you'll often see whole sentences jammed up before a "de" in order to describe a single noun (or wildly recursive uses of "de"). About half the time I'm at a loss to translate sometime I find that I'm just not using "de" enough.
> I'll also add Chinese's rather powerful "de" statement. It can be possessively and descriptively, but you'll often see whole sentences jammed up before a "de" in order to describe a single noun (or wildly recursive uses of "de")
You can achieve the same effect in spoken English by speaking the jammed up portion quicker, and it's sometimes written with hyphens: "a (whole-sentence-jammed-up-before-a-de)-before-it noun."
Nice list and interesting point. I haven't heard of Boroditsky before.
To your list I would add Finnish or Hungarian for some hard-core agglutinative features. I don't speak Turkish, so I cannot tell to what extent it behaves similarly in this regard. See for example this list with 2253 forms of the word "shop" in Finnish: :)
http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~fkarlsso/genkau2.html
Then to cover some indoeuropean vocabulary, I would add one slavic, one germanic and one neolatin language for good measure, although this is a bit too eu-centric.
Finnish and Hungarian belong to the Ural family, with a lot of similarities to Turkish and some other languages, so much so that people have put forward a super family, Ural-Altaic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural-Altaic_languages) to combine them. This is controversial, though. I bet someone speaking Finnish can pick up Turkish pretty quickly. Google "finnish turkish similarity" and you get many interesting (and some funny) results.
The existence of the phenomenon of translation proves that all natural languages have the same expressive power. You can translate a text from any language to any other language without losing its meaning, and the translation won't be 10x the size of the original. Typically there will be a close to 1-1 correspondence between the sentences and paragraphs in the original and the translation. None of which is true for programming languages, since programming languages actually do differ in significant ways.
I disagree. Meaning is lost. Maybe not for some classes of text, but for a lot of it, at least some meaning is completely lost. Also, different languages tend to reference different events, ideas, interpretations of history. Try for example translating "war on terror" into a language whose origin is a country with no problem with terrorism. Your translation may be understood on some level, but whatever compelling argument you make, it will be perceived very differently. The reader will walk away with a completely different conclusion of your thesis.
As an immediate counter example understandable even by someone who hasn't learnt another language, consider puns. They have plenty of meaning but will only be translatable to closely related languages. at best.
Actually, there are generally words that don't quite translate well. It's generally subtle connotations, so you can get the general meaning of a sentence, but not some of the undertones as easily. Since you won't get a compiler error if you miss some of the subtle differences in a translation and you'd need to be familiar with both languages in question, it's harder to pick up such differences.
For some examples of what I mean by concepts that are sometimes difficult to translate, look at most examples on this blog: www.betterthanenglish.com/
The older examples are generally better, and I don't agree with the phrase "untranslatable word", but it should provide some general idea of the kinds of ambiguities that would be lost in translation.
> Since you won't get a compiler error if you miss some of the subtle differences in a translation and you'd need to be familiar with both languages in question, it's harder to pick up such differences.
You might get a scowl, or some other non-verbal feedback, during speech.
> You can translate a text from any language to any other language without losing its meaning
You can't translate poetry. Sure, you can find the equivalent words between the language in which the poem has been written and the language you want to translate into, but the original meaning is lost. I can give you countless examples, but the easiest it would be for you to pick a poems' book written in a foreign language (I assume you already know a foreign language) and read it in original. And then read the translation in your native tongue. They aren't quite the same, are they?
You received another interesting answer. My native language is General American English, and I grew up in what was essentially a monolingual immediate family and neighborhood of English speakers, although both of my parents had had some instruction in other languages. All of my grandparents were born in the United States, but three of the four spoke languages other than English at home, and my two maternal grandparents had all of their schooling in German.
German as a second language was mandatory for all elementary pupils in fourth, fifth, and sixth grade in my childhood school district, very unusual for the United States. I had more German in junior high and senior high (in two different states) and then Russian in senior high. I entered university as a Russian major and immediately began taking Chinese, switching my major to Chinese as I grew in delight for that language. I have had formal instruction as an adult in Modern Standard Chinese (a.k.a. Mandarin), Cantonese, Biblical Hebrew, Literary Chinese, Attic Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Japanese (first in the medium of Chinese, then in English), Taiwanese, and Hakka, and various courses in linguistics (also in the mediums of both English and Chinese). I have engaged in self-study of Biblical Aramaic, Mongolian, Spanish, French, Latin, Hungarian, Malay-Indonesian, Esperanto, Interlingua, etc., etc., etc.
I have to respectfully disagree with the strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. Within each language grouping, people differ far more in their personal thinking along the dimension of visual thinker or not, or auditory thinker or not, than people differ from one another in thought patterns based on language background. But it is useful to learn another language and to live in another culture for exposure to new basic assumptions, and the same applies to learning computer language paradigms. Besides the book mentioned in another reply, I like the books
Okay then, I'm asking it. Because other than relating to languages, I don't see how the question helps.
I've studied Spanish (in highschool) and Japanese (for years) and while there were some new concepts (in grammar and sentence structure, mainly) they don't apply to anything but languages. And I'm not likely to try creating a language, and I've never had trouble expressing myself in the one I have.
Yeah, I meant it just from a linguistic point of view. The original question was about "different approaches and concepts" and this clearly applies to human languages as well. Some use gender for some purpose, some don't, some express posession in one way, some in another, one language uses suffixes where the other has prepositions, etc. etc. etc. I didn't say anything about difficulty of expressing oneself in any language.
The way to say those in English is "rejoicing in the misfortune of others" and "business owner."
After edit: the saying cherished by linguists in English is "'loanword' is a calque, and 'calque' is a loanword," which I find helpful for remembering which word is which.
Its not exactly uncommon for people to own businesses and to then employ people to run the company for them. This is pretty much how most long established public companies work.
3 other people already answered with the right answer, but I think it's worth expanding on it.
Some governments actually try to restrict the usage of loan words and try to keep the language 'pure'. I think this is death for a language, and I'm glad English adopts new words so readily.
Someone recently told me that they thought that almost all the really interesting creative works were in English these days because English is so expressive, where many other languages have only 1 word for a thing. The language he used as a reference was Spanish, which he is fluent in. The word he used as an example was 'garbage'. He said in Spanish he had only ever used 1 word for it, but in English we have 'trash', 'junk', 'refuse', 'waste', etc, etc.
I don't know if that's really why, but it's an interesting thought.
The words 'trash', 'junk', 'refuse', 'waste' all carry different connotations. Be forewarned, my information is largely relative to Wisconsin. Other regions of the US may use the words differently.
If applied to a person: trash usually refers to someone that's disreputable in some grievous way, waste would refer to some that squandered some talent or resources. Junk wouldn't usually apply to a person but junkie means a drug addict. Applying refuse to a person would be silly, but probably be .
If applied to stuff that's thrown out: Trash is a generic term for anything that's thrown away. Waste is usually consider excess like banana peels. (waste and trash are largely interchangeable in conversation, the distinction isn't usually important) Junk would refer to material possessions that are no longer wanted like an old couch. No one would call banana peels junk. Refuse is a pretentious/higher class term for trash used by rich old ladies.
I don't believe refuse is in the common usage any more. I've never heard it used outside of Star Trek 6 and some older movies. It's meaning is similar to "trash" but it can also refer a place where trash is stored.
Most of english is this way. Words are extremely flexible and can be used in a variety of ways with many meanings. Context is extremely important. I'm not sure how other languages work, I only speak english.
But that's the point! Spanish has that 1 word (which I don't know) that he has used in every situation. In English, he uses all those different words, depending on what slant he wants to put on it. English is -much- more expressive. (At least in that case.)
The English words for 'schadenfreude' and 'entrepreneur' are 'schadenfreude' and 'entrepreneur' respectively. Or did you think the rest of the language came to us on stone tablets?
I should elaborate that the point I guess I was trying to make is that a lot of the time we think we have no trouble expressing ourselves "in English" we aren't strictly using "English" to do it.
The follow-up point everyone is trying to make is that your idea of 'strict English' is bogus. It's a bit like complaining that there's no English word for 'forest' because we stole it from the French, or veranda, which we stole from Hindi.
