From: David Alan Black <dblack@...>
Date: 2001-05-17T03:29:07+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:15306] Re: [OT-ish] language (was: Re: Discussion on new Ruby features)

On Wed, 16 May 2001, Benjamin J. Tilly wrote:

> >===== Original Message From matz@zetabits.com (Yukihiro Matsumoto) =====
> >Hi,
> >
> >In message "[ruby-talk:15232] Re: Discussion on new Ruby features"
> >    on 01/05/16, "Hal E. Fulton" <hal9000@hypermetrics.com> writes:
> >
> >|I wonder if there's an English-vs-Japanese word-order effect here? Or
> >|maybe it's just me.
> >
> >Maybe.  You might not know that Japanese are pretty free-of-order
> >language.
>
> You mentioned this before.
>
> For those who missed it, Japanese is like German or Latin in being
> an inflected language.  The role of a word in the sentence is
> determined from the ending of the word, and not the position of
> the word in the sentence.
>
> Thus while there may be an order that people usually use, it is
> not required.

You would sound *very* strange in German if you messed with the word
order :-)

> What this also means is that any German who wants could put the
> verb earlier in the sentence and make translators happy.  But
> no, they just have to be difficult about it... :-)

Let's be fair to German :-)  Well, the verb-at-end thing does happen,
but not across the board.  It happens with auxiliaries and participles
or infinitives, or subordinate clauses, like:

   Ich habe das Buch gelesen.
    I  have the book   read .

whereas:

   Ich lese das Buch.
   I read (am reading) the book.

but also:

   Wie interessant, dass du das Buch liesst.
   How interesting  that you the book are reading.


I keep trying to ferret out correspondences between computer languages
and natural languages (I don't mean at a cognitive level -- more at an
aesthetic level), but it's all so intuitive as not to mean much.  I
find Perl's context sensitivity to be very inflection-like, sort of
like inflected articles that obviate prepositions (German "dem" often
equivalent on its own to "to the", for example).


David

-- 
David Alan Black
home: dblack@candle.superlink.net
work: blackdav@shu.edu
Web:  http://pirate.shu.edu/~blackdav