Toch weer antwoord: RE: Antwoord: Squeak Internationalization (vo orheen: Re: AW: AW: -- Whats this 'AW:' mean?)

Alan Kay Alan.Kay at squeakland.org
Wed Feb 6 04:50:11 UTC 2002


Hannes --

At 7:57 PM +0100 2/4/02, Hannes Hirzel wrote:
>Alan
>
>you rise a very interesting topic
>
>On Mon, 4 Feb 2002, Alan Kay wrote:
>>
>>  English itself is a Creole (from various invasions, especially the
>>  Norman Conquest), and I'm told by linguists that if not for this that
>>  our language would be very much like Frieslandisch (a regional
>>  dialect of Dutch).
>
>Yes, Frieslandisch is said to be the language most close to English.
>
>>  So absorbing words from elsewhere is one of the reasons that English
>>  thrives (including its very forgiving grammar (or almost lack of one )
>
>Actually this is not correct - many non-mother-tongue user of English are
>aware of this. What you mean is that in English the morphology is not very
>complex, i.e. speaking of inflection and derivation. However strictly
>speaking this statement is not precise.

I was actually being facetious ...

>
>Grammar means phonology, morphology and syntax and English is not
>lacking grammar :-).
>
>Leaving this terminology question aside you raise a very interesting
>point:
>English tends to be an isolating language.

Sometimes called an "analytic language" -- actually moving more and 
more towards one of the ultimate analytic languages: Mandarin Chinese 
-- which we computer folk would think is a pretty darn good way to do 
the grammar of a human language ...

Cheers,

Alan

>
>Explanation of the term:
>http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnIsolatingLanguage.htm
>
>This was the first link which showed up in google when searching for
>"isolating language". The second link there is worth checking as well
>
>http://www.geocities.com/finis_stellae/ng/lng/how/how_grammar.html
>Title: How to create a language
>
>It mentions isolating, agglutinating and inflecting languages and gives
>some considerations.
>
>A further link is from the UCLA language materials project on the Chinese
>language (an example of an isolating language):
>http://www.lmp.ucla.edu/profiles/profm02.htm
>
>and I quote:
>>Although this profile speaks of "Chinese languages/dialects" the Chinese
>>themselves refer to all forms of spoken Chinese as "dialects" even though
>>some of them are as different as Spanish and Italian and are not mutually
>>intelligible. The fiction of a single Chinese language--despite the many
>>historical forms, styles, and regional variants--persists because of a
>>_common writing system_ with deep historical roots and because of
>>  a common ideal of cultural unity.
>
>Emphasis on 'common writing system' added by me.
>
>This brings me to my point: In an isolating language the "keywords" are
>immutable and may be represented by icons (or logographs). The acoustic
>representation may be different.
>
>This transferred to Squeak and etoys specifically:
>The keywords are symbols which have a specific meaning,
>they can have an icon or an English, Frisian, French, German,
>Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Spanisch or Swedisch tag on it. (I
>tried not to forget any mother tongue of Sqeuak list contributors I'm
>aware of).
>It is possible to create a powerful language this way respecting the
>importance of word order (a part of syntax).
>
>I would be interested to learn more about your considerations
>and goals constructing the etoy language. May I ask you  to give me
>a link to a paper or a copy  of a paper on this?
>
>
>Regards
>Hannes Hirzel
>
>
>ALI Akan and ALI Swahili project
>ICT/ University of Zurich


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