-
Currently Reading
Testing Your Language Snobbiness
Posted on June 16, 2008
Filed Under Politics |
What if somebody showed you their programming language helped them program faster?
Would you switch? Would you try it?
What if somebody showed you their human language helped them think faster?
Would you switch? Would you try it?
Why do you ask?
I was in Germany for the past few weeks, and saw something notable: For any sufficiently long German text (more than a full paragraph), the equivalent English translation was about 10% shorter. In addition, English almost completely lacks accented characters (naïve is an English word with an accent). If the average English text is always shorter than the average German text, then there is a theoretical advantage to typing English: fewer different characters and fewer total characters in order to convey the same idea. This causes fewer problems for the typist.
The text samples I saw were all from museums, so this may not even be explicitly true for German/English. However, the main question remains: How much "better" are some languages than others? If a language is actually better, can it be provably shown? If someone proved it to me, would I use it?
This works for both programming languages and human languages.
Popularity: 16% [?]
Comments
11 Responses to “Testing Your Language Snobbiness”
Leave a Reply
I think English is probably shorter than German on average. However shorter does not necessarily mean better.
A more interesting point is other differences in language. In German, word order is different. For example, the verb often comes after the noun. “Eat cake” would be said “cake eat” in German (Kuche essen). Maybe this means that English speaking people focus more on the verb and Germans on the noun. Maybe.
Other differences may be the number of words used by an average speaker. Maybe more words used means that things are more precisely described. Maybe.
When it comes to programming languages, I’ve changed a few times and wouldn’t hesitate to change again. It seems impossible that I won’t.
For “norma language” I am already messed up being native Swedish with an Austrian girlfriend and with English dominating what I read and write. A mess which brings me to my last point:
The more languages I use, the better I write and read. The more programming languages I know, the better I program. Maybe that’s the biggest difference.
Naïve is originally a French word and, according to the OED, the accent is optional when used in English.
It’s the same with English and French too, although usually the gap is more than 10%. Given two sentences, one in French and the translation in English (or the other way around) sometimes the gap looks to be as high as 50%.
The difference comes when it is spoken though, as French is more “fluid” it usually takes about the same amount of time to say the two sentences.
On another note, I’d say the effort involved with changing spoken languages is much more than changing programming languages.
As a native German speaker, I concur, regarding the length of equivalent German and English texts. On average, English texts are shorter than their German translation. For example I just translated the first comment by Albin, and my quick & dirty German version, while being almost literal, and therefore not “native” German, is about 18% longer. There are some grammatical constructs that are easy to write in English, but quite difficult (or verbose) in German.
—
Ich denke, dass Englisch im Durchschnitt kürzer ist als Deutsch. Allerdings bedeutet kürzer nicht notwendigerweise besser.
Interessanter sind da schon andere Unterschiede zwischen Sprachen. Im Deutschen ist die Reihenfolge der Wörter anders. Zum Beispiel kommt das Verb oft nach dem Substantiv. “Eat cake” würde auf deutsch “cake eat” gesprochen (Kuchen essen). Vielleicht bedeutet das, dass englischsprachige Leute sich mehr auf das Verb, Deutsche sich mehr auf das Substantiv konzentrieren. Vielleicht.
Andere Unterschiede könnten die Anzahl der Wörter sein, die ein durchschnittlicher Sprecher verwendet. Vielleicht bedeutet mehr verwendete Wörter, dass Dinge präziser beschrieben werden. Vielleicht.
Programmiersprachen habe ich ein paar Mal gewechselt, und würde nicht zögern, nochmal zu wechseln. Es scheint mir unmöglich, die Sprache nicht mehr zu wechseln.
Was “normale Sprache” angeht, bin ich als gebürtiger Schwede, mit österreichischer Freudin und englischsprachiger Dominanz, bei dem was ich lese oder schreibe, bereits durcheinander. Dieses Durcheinander bringt mich zu meinem letzten Punkt:
Je mehr Sprachen ich verwende, desto besser schreibe und lese ich. Je mehr Programmiersprachen ich kenne, desto bessere programmiere ich. Vielleicht ist das der größte Unterschied.
—-
This aside, there’s a lot more to a language than the absolute total length of (written) words. German umlauts, for example, contribute to the consistency of the language (foot/feet are not very similar, Fuß/Füße are). Words are spelt almost like they’re spoken (and vice versa), which appears to be different in English (at least to me). Besides, you don’t think 10% faster just because your written text is 10% shorter, sorry to disappoint you
I Agree with Albin above,
I speak native Portuguese, have a very good English and know some japanese.
English is shorter to express most of the things than portuguese is, but portuguese is (arguably) more complete in many situations. For instance, in portuguese you have different ways of saying the same verbs for the type of future and past which you mean (we have 2 types of future and 3 types of past), and we have different ways of saying a verb depending on the subject (the same way you have “is” and “are” in english, but we have a different one for I, You, He, She, We, You, They), which allows you to more safely hide the subject of the sentence.
Japanese, for instance, has no future tense, and all your future sentences must be said like the present but mentioning the future, like “I do this tomorrow”.
So, as Albin said, knowing multiple languages, both in programming and spoken language, allows you to fill holes in your thought process which your original language doesn’t support, just like someone misses pointers when not programming in C++, misses higher order functions when programming in Java, or misses macros when not programming in a Lisp dialect.
Very interesting topic.
Interesting idea! I suspect that the reason English is shorter is that it has more words overall, and so needs fewer to describe a particular concept; it has a larger ’standard library’.
I wonder if there is any mileage in adapting natural language towards something more formal, for comments, design documents, and other pieces of programming text? I’m thinking that English has ambiguities and conventions which make it less than ideal for describing data, algorithms, and logic. For example; talking about logic, familiar words like ‘if’ and ‘or’ are not sufficient; you need ‘iff’ and ‘xor’, too.
Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as ‘better’ or ‘worse’.
What you’re talking about is the Sapir-Worf hypothesis. Language can affect thought, but Language does more than convey literal meanings. It also conveys social information.
As for accent marks. English could use a few, our spelling system is notoriously rigid and difficult to understand. But it too conveys information.
Ultimately, all you can determine is that some languages express certain concepts more or less concisely.
Example.:
My name is James.
first Person Posessive - noun meaning name - present tense, third person copula - Proper noun, my name.
Ich heiße James.
First Person nominative pronoun - first person present tense verb meaning ‘to be called’ - Proper noun, my name.
Jeg år James.
First Person nominative pronoun - present tense copula - Proper noun, my name.
Я - James.
First person nominative pronoun - Proper noun, my name.
See how each tells slightly different info, while carrying similar meaning?
That’s an interesting hypothesis, although learning a new programming language is more akin to learning a new mathematical notation than learning a new natural language (which, though effortless as a toddler, takes quite a bit of effort after age 10 or so).
German is interesting in that it has relatively few root words that are then composed into words with more complex meanings. For instance, the word for a state of mental distraction is Zerstreutheit, which means something like strewn-about-ness. The verb streuen means to scatter, and zerstreut means scattered around.
I realize that this is a stretch, but English might be called the PHP of natural languages (with, for example, dozens of functions that do slightly different things to arrays) versus German, which might be the Ruby of natural languages (where you’d use a more-general iterator together with a task-specific anonymous block).
Here’s Albin’s English-language comment translated into simplified Chinese (using http://translate.google.com/translate_t).
我觉得英语可能是短，超过了学习德语的平均值。但较短的并不一定意味着更好。
更有趣的一点是其他语言的差异。在德国，语序是不同的。举例来说，往往是动词后的名词。 “吃的蛋糕”会说： “蛋糕吃”在德国（库车埃森） 。也许这意味着以英语为母语的人更专注于动词和德国对名词。大概。
其他的分歧可能的数目字所用的平均议长。也许更多的所用的字眼是指事情是更准确地描述。大概。
当谈到编程语言，我已经改变了数次，并会毫不迟疑地再次改变。似乎不可能，我不会。
“诺玛的语言： ”我已经搞砸被本土瑞典与奥地利的女朋友和以英语主导，我阅读和书写。搞得一塌糊涂，这使我想到我的最后一点：
更我所使用的语言使用，更好地我写和阅读。更编程语言我所知，其I计划。也许这就是最大的不同。
How much shorter is it?
Interesting that you’re posting this now, since I just left Germany yesterday, after spending a week and a half there.
I also noticed that in notices posted in multiple languages, the English is often much shorter. But, when I looked closely, I realized that the English messages are stated more simply in many cases. For example, on the S-Bahn in Munich, the German message reads something like “Anyone who rides without purchasing a ticket, or properly stamping the ticket, …” while the English reads “Anyone who rides without a valid ticket”.
From all of the blog posts that you have posted. I would def. have to agree with this one the most. I read my friends German book and im pretty sure just saying hi, is about fifteen times longer in German than English. Either way this still makes a lot of sense and I think it could be a possible persuasion to solve the immigration problem ;). You hit the head of the nail with this post.