From: Christian Weisgerber (naddy@mips.inka.de)
Date: Sun Dec 22 2002 - 17:01:16 MST
Robert J. Bradbury <bradbury@aeiveos.com> wrote:
> > Does anyone know about the maximum number of languages that can be learnt?
>
> I think it is in the vicinity of 5-6 (with some degree of fluency).
That's Peter Ustinov, although I think he has more than "some degree
of fluency". Rare but not really unusual, as far as I know. There
is also the question whether you want to weigh the relatedness of
the languages concerned. Speaking, say, Portuguese, Spanish, and
Italian could be judged less formidable than speaking three unrelated
languages such as Russian, Arabic, and Japanese.
[computer languages]
> The principles behind most of these languages with the exception of
> LISP and SMALLTALK are pretty much the same so relearning a new
> vocabulary isn't too difficult.
Yes, that is an important point. There are a couple of programming
paradigms out there (imperative, functional, object-oriented, ...).
Learning another language that employs a paradigm you already know
requires very little effort.
> The primary difference between natural languages and computer
> languages is that the "natural" vocabulary is much larger.
Yes. However, you need to be careful when considering the vocabulary
of a computer language. For example, look at C, which is reasonably
well-known to most people in the field. C only has a handful of
keywords (and another handful of operators composed from nonalphabetic
characters that really need to be counted as keywords, too). But
there's not all that much that you can do with pure C. For practical
work you need to know the standard library, which is not part of
the language proper and adds a lot of "vocabulary". Then, for real
world programming, you also need to know operating system bindings
and all sorts of APIs. A lot of stuff that is considered to belong
to the core part of some languages comes as external libraries for
other languages.
> There are a few "natural" languages that have a very different
> syntax -- but they are a minority.
I wonder what you have in mind there...
Most non-linguists have no idea how many "weird" features there are
in existing languages. It doesn't help that most people in the
Western countries have only had exposure to a subset of Indo-European
languages that are closely or even incestuously related.
> So the difference between learning a computer language and a
> natural language is really a question of the required size of the
> vocabulary.
I'm far from sure that this is *the* difference, but is *a* huge
difference.
-- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de
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