merits of Lisp vs Python

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 10 Dec 2006 06:40:46 +0000, Kirk Sluder wrote:

>> > To start with, English does not restrict the expressiveness and 
>> > power of the syntax and grammar.
>> 
>> Really? There are no restrictions whatsoever in English syntax and
>> grammar? None at all? 
> 
> Of course I didn't say that: What I said was, "To start with, 
> English does not restrict the expressiveness and 
> power of the syntax and grammar. People who use the English language 
> in specific communities and in specific forms of discourse do.

Hang on... are you saying that *people* create languages? 

*slaps head*

And here I was thinking that languages fell from the sky like donuts!
Gosh, thank you for explaining that too me. What a fool I must seem!

By the way, that was sarcasm. Of course the English language doesn't exist
in a vacuum. Of course people -- not rocks, not trees, not the Greek
Furies, and especially not the Academie Francaise -- create languages.
And, as an Australian in a world dominated by Americans, I know damn well
that different communities of English speakers use different rules.

*Slightly* different rules. That's why Standard American English and
British English are both English, not different languages like Italian and
German or Korean and Russian.

[snip]
> As an example of the context-specific nature of pragmatics at work, 
> if I was your reviewer or editor, I'd reject this manuscript.

Perhaps you should find out what "manuscript" means before talking about
rejecting one, because what I wrote was most certainly not a manuscript in
any English language I'm aware of.

> As a 
> participant on usenet, I'll just point out that you selectively 
> quoted the antithesis, and deleted my thesis to argue a straw-man.

Look, I was arguing a really simple point: for communication to occur
between two individuals, both people must agree on a set of rules for the
language that they use to communicate. If they don't have a common
language with agreed upon rules, communication will be feeble and weak, if
not non-existent, or there will be misunderstandings and errors.

Is that so hard to grasp? If you ask for "fire water", by which you
mean whiskey, but I understand to be petrol (gasoline), you're going
to be a very sick person indeed if you drink what I give you.


> Of course there are restrictions, *enforced by users of language in 
> specific communities.*  But the English language is quite malleable, 
> and includes not only the discourse we are currently engaged in, but 
> the clipped jargon of internet chat and amateur radio, the 
> chronically passive discourse of academia, the passionate chants of 
> protesters, and a wide variety of poetic expression.

Did I say it wasn't malleable? You are attacking me for things I never
said.


> This is where wannabe critics of "English grammar" fail to 
> understand the language they claim to defend, much to the amusement 
> of those of us who actually do study language as it is, rather than 
> the mythical eternal logos we want it to be.

Ho ho ho, have you ever jumped to a foolish conclusion. You think I'm one
of those tiresome bores who think that just because the ancient Romans
couldn't end a sentence with a preposition, English shouldn't either?
Puh-lease!

 
> Languages are (with some trivial exceptions) human creations. The 
> laws, rules and restrictions of languages are dynamic and dependent 
> on community, mode, medium and context. Of course, wannabe 
> grammarians frequently rise up at this point and say that if such is 
> the case, then there is nothing to prevent <language of choice> from 
> devolving into a babble of incomprehensible dialects. To which the 
> easy response is that the benefits of conformity to linguistic 
> communities almost always outweigh the costs of nonconformist 
> expression.

Yes yes, you're really passionate about language, you have little respect
for grammarians, blah blah blah. None of that has the slightest relevance
to what I was talking about. I'm not denying that languages evolve and
mutate. I'm talking about the simple fact -- and it is a fact -- that two
people must share at least some common linguistic concepts in order
to communicate, and the fewer common constructs they share, the worse
the communication. Languages accomplish that through rules. Yes, the
rules are mere conventions, and can change. They're still rules.

Some languages have very strict rules, some have very flexible rules, but
they all have rules and they all restrict how you use the language.
English has a rule that you turn "programmer" into a plural by adding
"s" to the end. If you decide to drop the -er and add -ing instead, as in
"I hired a team of six programming this week", at best people will do a
double-take and be forced to work out what you mean from context. If you
decide to make the plural of programmer by deleting the first and last
three characters, nobody will have any idea what drugs you are smoking.


[snip]
>> So, when I say "sits cat rat" it is not only legal English, but you can
>> tell which animal is sitting on which?
> 
> What is "legal" in English depends on the communities in which you 
> are currently participating. Likely there is some community in which 
> such clipped discourse is understood and therefore legal.

Oh yes, the mythical "some community". Nope, sorry, I don't buy it. That's
not legal in any English dialect I've come across, and I've dealt with --
and still do -- English speakers from all over the world. No English
language or dialect typically puts the verb in front of both the object
and subject for present tense expressions. It isn't just *clipped*, the
word order is completely different from English. Didn't you notice that?

But in fact even if there is some obscure dialect of English that would
allow that, that doesn't change my point that there are some constructs
which aren't legal in English (as it exists today). If not "sit cat rat",
something else.

No doubt you can come up with some particular idiomatic phrase in English
that puts the verb first, or a different grammatical construct like the
imperative tense, e.g. "Sit on the rat, cat!". Poetry, in particular,
sometimes uses the verb-subject-object order. But these exceptions merely
emphasis that English, unlike Gaelic, doesn't normally write
verb-subject-object.

A language that was so radically different from all the other English
dialects as to allow "sits cat rat" as a typical construct wouldn't be
English. It might be a pidgin or a creole language. But it won't be
English, not now. In the indefinite future, who knows? I'm not saying that
languages are carved in stone, never to change -- that would be stupid.
But at any one time, languages have rules, even if those rules change over
time, and if two people disagree on those rules, communication is hurt, up
to the point of stopping communication completely.


> If you are 
> talking to me, I'd express my lack of comprehension by saying 
> "Pardon?" and ask you to rephrase.

And how unfortunate for you that in my local community, "pardon" is the
worst insult imaginable and I punch you in the face.

(See, you aren't the only one that can just invent local communities
with implausible variations of English.)


>> But I'm belaboring the point. Of course English has restrictions in
>> grammar and syntax -- otherwise one could write something in Latin or
>> Thai or Mongolian and call it English. There are RULES of grammar and
>> syntax in English, which means that there are possible expressions which
>> break those rules -- hence there are expressions which one can't write in
>> legal English.
> 
> When you make an "illegal" statement in English, exactly who or what 
> corrects you?
> 
> Is it Zeus, the divine Logos, the flying spaghetti monster, some 
> platonic ideal?

No. Your peers or your parents or your editor or your teachers correct
you. Or you get a reputation for being "stupid" and people start treating
you as if you were stupid -- maybe they start talk-ing ver-y slow-ly at
you, using baby words. Or people just find it difficult to communicate
with you, or misunderstand what you are trying to say.

There is no law of physics that says that people can't say "Head on my hat
I put". But English speakers just don't do it, and when somebody does,
they are treated as if they aren't speaking English.

But notice that semantics is important -- if I were to say "Head on my
pillow I lay", chances are good that I'd be treated as speaking
poetically, rather than as a non-English speaker. We commonly lay our head
on our pillow, but put our hat on our head.

> As you can probably tell, this kind of silliness is a bit of a sore 
> spot for me. So please by all means, do some basic reading of 
> linguistics before you continue to engage in such silliness. Or at 
> least learn to properly quote an argument.

Before patronizing me, do make the effort to understand what I am saying.
Just because you've got valid concerns about ignorant grammarians doesn't
excuse your carelessness. Instead of reading what I actually wrote, you
read into it what you wanted to see: another stupid wanna-be grammarian
who thinks that languages are frozen, static, dead things. You couldn't be
more wrong, and your repeated assumption -- and that's all it was, just an
assumption -- that I know nothing about linguistics is shameful.

Are you man enough to acknowledge your error, or are you going to continue
this ridiculous charade of attacking me for holding views I don't have?


-- 
Steven.