On Wed, Jul 21, 1999 at 05:23:44AM -0700, Markus Kuhn wrote:
> The advantage of English is its grammatical simplicity, which is of
> great help to the beginning learner.
Advantage??? The lack of any serious grammar was one of the most serious
stumbling blocks back when I was studying English. And the fact that so
many Americans do not use even the little grammar there is properly,
made it very difficult to understand them for years after I moved to
America.
Add to it that English uses so many verbs followed by a preposition.
That, again, took me years to master. When I was asked "What are you
up to?" for the first time and replied I did not understand, the man
who had asked the question refused to believe me. To him it was easy.
To me it made no sense.
Additionally, just about every English word has more than one meaning.
Again, when I first came here, I needed to register for the courses
of study at a University. They told me to "pick up a form." I looked
up (hey, why looked "up" I still do not know) "pick up" in the
dictionary which translated it as "lift". That was obviously not what
they meant.
Worst of all, English is ridden with idioms. It is rare that an English
sentence means what the words are saying. English is a language of
images, not of straight ideas.
And forget the enunciation. At least in America, you can never say
what vowel a word (or is it wird, werd, wurd?) contains from the way
it is pronounced.
Now, if you want a language that has fairly simple grammar, is very easy
to learn (at least to an Indo-European, I cannot speak for others),
and where what you say is what you mean, as well as enunciate every
sound clearly, try Italian. Molto facile, molto semplice! Took me two
months to learn.
The choice of English as "lingua franca" (shouldn't we change that
expression to "lingua anglica"?) has nothing to do with the ease
of learning. It has all to do with economic and political influence
of the United States. Although, when I was a teenager, I thought
it was because the Beatles were English. :-)
That has been the case in history. It used to be Egyptian, then Greek,
Latin, French. And Chinese in another part of the world. It will be
something else (Japanese? Russian?) a hundred years from now, when
English will be "Greek" to most. (Isn't that ironic that Greek was
once the universal language of the Western civilization, and now
it is used - in English idioms - to mean something that no one
understands?)
To get back on topic of Unicode, I am all for Unicode being acceptable
for keywords and identifiers in programming languages. I do not think it
should be mandated by the Unicode standard, rather it should become logical
evolution of programming languages, something done by authors of new
languages and standards bodies of old.
It is already happening. For example, my own Graphic Counter Language,
as of version 3.0, accepts any 8-bit byte (i.e. a byte with the high
bit set) as a valid character in all identifiers. This is based on the
assumption that the text may be UTF-8 encoded. To extend that to other
languages, all that is needed is for compiler writers to accept the same.
It is not necessary for the compiler to "understand" the encoding. All
it needs to do is accept any 8-bit value as a valid "character". That
alone means support not just for Unicode but for any and all existing
and future 8-bit charsets. After all, it is quite easy to convert
16-bit Unicode (and 32-bit ISO) to UTF-8 and back, and in the UTF-8
encoding any non-ASCII U+???? becomes a sequence of 8-bit values.
The compiler need not convert it back to Unicode. It just needs
to accept it as a valid and unique identifier. It does not matter
that this method also accepts non-ASCII punctuation as valid in
identifiers. Not only is there nothing wrong with that, it makes
programming languages more like real human languages at no extra
cost to the complexity of the parser.
Adam
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:48 EDT