Why learn Esperanto?

General discussion about learning languages
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Re: Why learn Esperanto?

Postby Deinonysus » Thu Jul 15, 2021 1:02 am

Le Baron wrote:Yes, I've used them. Though I'm no 'programming expert'. The notion of 'human-readable shorthand' for interfacing with a computer tells me that it actually is a language, since if you use this written shorthand to make requests and the receiver deciphers, understands and carries out the instruction, you have communicated with it. The moving of 1s and 0s to accomplish the task is of little importance because it's something aside from the act of communicating requests (and getting feedback).
Just like if you ask a man to make you a sandwich, if he understands you, then language has succeeded. How he goes about the task is something else.
So, when I say language I don't mean any possible way of conveying information, but I'm referring specifically to human languages, the things with nouns and verbs and grammar, like American Sign Language or Esperanto or French, that you can translate Hamlet into. There are many ways of conveying information that are not languages. For example, you can convey general emotions with smiley or frowny faces, or you can show how to put furniture together with pictures of the IKEA Man, but those are not languages in the sense that Swahili is a language. Similarly, you can't translate Hamlet into Python or SQL or Javascript. At best you can make a humorous parody that would be funny to someone who was already familiar with Hamlet but would be meaningless to someone who knew the programming language but didn't know Hamlet.

How would you ask someone to make you a sandwich in a programming language of your choice, in a way that would actually run and that a typical computer would understand? Or for that matter, how would you translate Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into a programming language of your choice?
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Re: Why learn Esperanto?

Postby Le Baron » Thu Jul 15, 2021 1:30 am

Deinonysus wrote:So, when I say language I don't mean any possible way of conveying information, but I'm referring specifically to human languages, the things with nouns and verbs and grammar, like American Sign Language or Esperanto or French, that you can translate Hamlet into.

Would you consider the 'language' used to ask the computer (which 'understands' these interactions because it is a human design) which then produces Mozart K.563, or something just like it, as not having engaged in an exchange by means of language? As far as I can tell computer languages employ rules, so why isn't that 'grammar'? Chomsky provided a grammar model (mathematical) to be employed for writing computer languages.

Deinonysus wrote:There are many ways of conveying information that are not languages. For example, you can convey general emotions with smiley or frowny faces, or you can show how to put furniture together with pictures of the IKEA Man, but those are not languages in the sense that Swahili is a language. Similarly, you can't translate Hamlet into Python or SQL or Javascript. At best you can make a humorous parody that would be funny to someone who was already familiar with Hamlet but would be meaningless to someone who knew the programming language but didn't know Hamlet.

In the sense that Swahili is a language? Well of course.. the computer language is designed for interfacing with computers, rather than commissioning human artists to write plays or asking for pints of scrumpy. For the latter other forms of coded verbal (and some non-verbal) interaction are used. I think the IKEA building instructions are a form of language, if very basic. Semiotics in that the signs are imbued with meaning we can understand, unless we are middle-class dads who can't work a screwdriver. Airport signage is all semiotic, none-verbal, non-written communication these days because they're international. Frowny/smiley faces are certainly a sort of basic language, as is evidenced by how chimpanzees use them to communicate.

Deinonysus wrote:How would you ask someone to make you a sandwich in a programming language of your choice, in a way that would actually run and that a typical computer would understand? Or for that matter, how would you translate Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into a programming language of your choice?

I wouldn't I would just go to a sandwich shop. Although the simplest solution for me would be for the output to just come onto the screen saying: 'Make Le Baron a sandwich'. At which point I would feel it was a success, if a bit Heath Robinson style just to get a sandwich.
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Re: Why learn Esperanto?

Postby Saim » Thu Jul 15, 2021 5:33 am

Le Baron wrote:the computer language is designed for interfacing with computers, rather than commissioning human artists to write plays or asking for pints of scrumpy.


Computer language is designed to make computers do things, not to communicate with them. In this case it is much more similar to a lever, a button or a dial than to any language.

While Swahili may allow you to commission an artist to write a play, that is not what it is "designed for": note that you've spoken a lot about how natural languages allow commands or imperatives, and yet natural languages are not primarily made up of commands. This suggests to me that you're twisting superficial aspects of natural languages so that they appear to match up to computer "languages" rather than analysing the real structures of human language.
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Re: Why learn Esperanto?

Postby rdearman » Thu Jul 15, 2021 7:34 am

I believe I now need to fork a new programming thread. But!

You (all) misunderstand the difference between assembers and compilers or interpreters like python if you believe they are moving ones and zeros around. Assembly languages translate shorthand into ones and zeros of machine code. However, compilers or interpreter do not. They are an abstraction which allows people to write programs which can be run on different hardware and different operating systems. These languages are by humans for humans. The computer does not understand Python or C these languages need to be run through another program which will translate it into assembly and then into machine code specific to the machine.

So even the computer doesn't understand modern programming languages and has to have them translated. Programming languages have concepts the computer doesn't understand like polymorphism, linked lists, etc. These are human concepts for humans. Code is written for other humans in case they need to chnage or modify. That is why it is has a standard syntax and agreed lexicons.

Code might give instructions to computers, but it is written for humans.
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Re: Why learn Esperanto?

Postby Le Baron » Thu Jul 15, 2021 1:28 pm

Saim wrote:
Le Baron wrote:the computer language is designed for interfacing with computers, rather than commissioning human artists to write plays or asking for pints of scrumpy.

Computer language is designed to make computers do things, not to communicate with them. In this case it is much more similar to a lever, a button or a dial than to any language.

While Swahili may allow you to commission an artist to write a play, that is not what it is "designed for": note that you've spoken a lot about how natural languages allow commands or imperatives, and yet natural languages are not primarily made up of commands. This suggests to me that you're twisting superficial aspects of natural languages so that they appear to match up to computer "languages" rather than analysing the real structures of human language.


'Twisting'? Interesting vocabulary choice. Anyway rdearman's post following clarified things for me. Computer languages are in fact languages. With their own vocabulary, syntax and rules.
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Re: Why learn Esperanto?

Postby Deinonysus » Thu Jul 15, 2021 1:59 pm

rdearman wrote:I believe I now need to fork a new programming thread. But!

You (all) misunderstand the difference between assembers and compilers or interpreters like python if you believe they are moving ones and zeros around. Assembly languages translate shorthand into ones and zeros of machine code. However, compilers or interpreter do not. They are an abstraction which allows people to write programs which can be run on different hardware and different operating systems. These languages are by humans for humans. The computer does not understand Python or C these languages need to be run through another program which will translate it into assembly and then into machine code specific to the machine.

So even the computer doesn't understand modern programming languages and has to have them translated. Programming languages have concepts the computer doesn't understand like polymorphism, linked lists, etc. These are human concepts for humans. Code is written for other humans in case they need to chnage or modify. That is why it is has a standard syntax and agreed lexicons.

Code might give instructions to computers, but it is written for humans.
Well, I was trying to give an ELI5 overview of how a programming language is different from a human language, so I didn't feel the need to get into the weeds of compilers, interpreters, bytecode, JIT, lambda functions, or anything like that. All of those things will eventually end up as binary when it's time for execution, there are just different ways of organizing it.

But, Le Baron is satisfied that programming languages are languages, and I'm satisfied that they aren't, probably because of a disconnect in how we define "language". So I don't feel any need to keep going and run this into the ground.
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Re: Why learn Esperanto?

Postby Dragon27 » Thu Jul 15, 2021 3:35 pm

Deinonysus wrote:All of those things will eventually end up as binary when it's time for execution, there are just different ways of organizing it.

And what of it? What difference does it make what kind of low-level representation it assumes at a certain stage of its existence (if this stage comes at all)? All our high-level language concepts end up as vibrations in the air when it comes to producing speech.
If you seek to demonstrate that computer languages aren't fit to be called languages (and I'm not saying whether I agree with that, or not) this is not the way to go about it, in my opinion.
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Re: Why learn Esperanto?

Postby Deinonysus » Thu Jul 15, 2021 4:26 pm

Dragon27 wrote:
Deinonysus wrote:All of those things will eventually end up as binary when it's time for execution, there are just different ways of organizing it.

And what of it? What difference does it make what kind of low-level representation it assumes at a certain stage of its existence (if this stage comes at all)? All our high-level language concepts end up as vibrations in the air when it comes to producing speech.
If you seek to demonstrate that computer languages aren't fit to be called languages (and I'm not saying whether I agree with that, or not) this is not the way to go about it, in my opinion.

That's fair. I might have overshot the point a bit with the binary argument.

My definition of a language might be a fair bit narrower than what others might use (again, that might by my point of disconnect with some other folks in this thread), and it's heavily influenced by Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct. Language is something that humans naturally generate. If children grow up speaking a defective language such as a pidgin, they will formalize it into a proper language (a creole). If children are born without a language, they will generate one. The building blocks of a language include grammar, verbs, nouns, clauses, et cetera, and anything that can be said or written in one human language can be translated into any other human language.

Looping back to Esperanto: as I believe has been said earlier in the thread, there have been many native speakers of Esperanto, and as expected, their native Esperanto is a bit different from Zamenhof's standard Esperanto. These differences are summarized here. These differences are actually fairly minor, indicating that Esperanto is actually quite a naturalistic language. It helps that the initial definition was quite minimal and a lot of the gaps were filled in by common usage as the language evolved. Lojban is probably much less naturalistic and I would wager that were it to have native speakers, they would change it quite radically.

The building blocks of a programming language are not the same as those of a human language. Their building blocks are things like algorithms and data structures, which ultimately stem from the movement of memory. As far as I understand it, anything that one Turing-complete programming language does can also be done by any other Turing-complete language. But programming languages don't pass the Hamlet test. You can't meaningfully translate Hamlet into any programming language; this is because of the fundamental difference between human languages and programming languages. I'm not saying that there are no similarities between human languages and programming languages, but they are fundamentally different things that work in fundamentally different ways.

Esperanto does pass the Hamlet test. A translation can be found here. This is because Esperanto works like a human language, not like a programming language.
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Re: Why learn Esperanto?

Postby devilyoudont » Thu Jul 15, 2021 11:14 pm

I'm not aware of any native speaker of Lojban, but I am aware that someone is attempting to raise their child bilingual in English and Toki Pona. It would be very interesting to know if there is a difference between acquisition of a naturalistic language like Esperanto vs acquisition of an intentionally unnatural language like Toki Pona. It may also be that the child simply rejects the language, as happened previously with Klingon.
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Re: Why learn Esperanto?

Postby Iversen » Fri Jul 16, 2021 10:48 am

I have done quite a lot of programming in my time, all the way back to the 80s where I preferred to program my Commodore 64 in machine code rather than in Basic. Later I learned to program in Pascal and a bit of c, but after that I lived my life mostly through VBasic. And it is obvious that the words I used there are English, but the logic behind a program isn't the same as it is for a 'normal' message in English - and that's what separates programming languages from ordinary babble. You could argue that there is some kind of overlap, with syntactical patterns instead of loops and conditions and all that stuff, but the emphasis is different. You could also argue that a computer program may need to reference other tidbits of programming, like when you call a function in WIndows from a Basic application, which could be seen as a parallel to telling a friend where (s)he can buy shoe polish in glass vessels - but again, the likeness is mostly theoretical and the 'feel' is totally different. If all English words in the progamming of a complicated application were replaced by words in Klingon (and the thing that interprets the programming was modified to understand Klingon words rather than English ones) then the program would run. Try doing that with a novel.

As for Esperanto it feels like a totally normal language once you have learnt it. But if it weren't relatively easy to learn it would be a vaste of time since there is so little relevant non-fictional material in the language.
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