From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,5cb36983754f64da X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2004-02-11 11:26:10 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news2.google.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newshub.sdsu.edu!newshosting.com!nx02.iad01.newshosting.com!border1.nntp.ash.giganews.com!border2.nntp.sjc.giganews.com!border1.nntp.sjc.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!local1.nntp.sjc.giganews.com!nntp.comcast.com!news.comcast.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2004 13:26:08 -0600 Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2004 14:26:07 -0500 From: "Robert I. Eachus" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: No call for Ada (was Re: Announcing new scripting/prototyping language) References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.147.77.160 X-Trace: sv3-6WDedWR4Ixz2R0wuWpzD2E1SRoLqAC524Ttl4pubH+gNFTZfV0g0Yg7kGuYgA++T+VVICQmtqhw2gJj!l0hDND/sre5cOhZSZF1MApxXdWYN1cNZdgrYD9AcNz/8gqWdkvs+J1D/i/Jwjg== X-Complaints-To: abuse@comcast.net X-DMCA-Complaints-To: dmca@comcast.net X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.1 Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:5447 Date: 2004-02-11T14:26:07-05:00 List-Id: Alexandre E. Kopilovitch wrote: I said: >>This effect can >>also be seen in spoken languages you can't understand the French and the >>people of Quebec unless you can think in French. (I am the first to >>admit I can't. I can try, but I find the exercise very strenuous. I >>need to literally accept a foreign viewpoint to do it well and I am >>unwilling to do so. >>The cultural baggage with Arabic and Chinese is >>larger that that which comes with French, but it isn't as imperialistic. > > This sentence seems quite strange... well, not exactly. I can't believe that > you know so much about Arabic or Chinese culture that you can estimate whether > or not it is imperialistic. After all, most of their cultural baggages (which > are large, as you said) were created during their corresponding Imperial ages. > Not knowing French (as you said) you certainly can't judge French cultural > baggade in this aspect as well. But you did that, and there is a clear cause > for that - you see French as the most important center of resistance against > worldwide propagation of American viewpoint. Well, I think that this feeling > is quite correct, and this is why recently I gradually become interested in > learning French (there are, and always were other reasons of course, but this > new additional one has a chance to be decisive). I think you misunderstood. I speak French well enough to get along, in both Paris and Quebec--although my accent is hardly Parisian. But I can't fit my thoughts inside the language imposed worldview. So when I am speaking French I am thinking in English then translating. (I don't have to go through that step when listening.) It has been awhile since I studied Chinese, long enough that the new transliterations still seem strange. And I suspect I would feel more at home in Taiwan than mainland China. >>Japanese on the other hand, is much more demanding than French, but in >>another sense it is not as hard. Japanese requires you to act in >>certain ways, but it doesn't try as hard to impose its worldview on you. >>... >>However, I have found >>that there is a huge difference in world view between those Japanese who >>speak English and those who don't, > > This passage about Japanese vividly reminds me the following anecdote: > > ---------- > A Pan Am 727 flight engineer waiting for start clearance in Munich overheard > the following: > > Lufthansa (in German): Ground, what is our start clearance time?" > > Ground (in English): "If you want an answer you must speak English." > > Lufthansa (in English): "I am a German, flying a German airplane, in Germany. > Why must I speak English?" > > Unknown voice (in a beautiful British accent): "Because you lost the bloody > war!" And the French pretend they were on the winning side, rather than losing early, being occupied for years, and then liberated by the Allies. ;-) In fact in French, it is hard to think of French military history as other than glorious. > I can't speak for Germanic languages, but for Russian I tend to agree. Yes, > I don't think that Russian, as a language, is substantially associated with > any specific viewpoint. (But its Soviet flavour certainly was... I hope it is > obvious.) > > But just one external observation about Germanic languages: although it may > be true that the whole family of Germanic languages isn't substantially > associated with any particular viewpoint, this seems to be false for one > particular area, and the corresponding language flavour: Austria. It seems > that there, in Austria, some coherent viewpoint was present (I don't know > whether it is still alive). Sure in Austria there is a consistent world view: Austrian beer is better than any other beer, including German. ;-) Seriously the Austrian culture is very relaxed compared to northern Germany. But I spent a couple years in Bavaria, and the culture there seemed very similar to Austria. (In fact, I think that southern German is still more religious and fun loving than Austria, but compared to northern Germany, the difference is relatively minor.) All this is sort of very off topic for this newsgroup, with one exception. The languages that we discussed as not imposing world views seem to be required learning at a young age (usually as a "milk tongue") to be any good at building compilers and designing programming languages. (There are some excellent language designers in France, but they all seem to speak fluent English. So it may be that if French is your milk tongue you can learn another language later, and still commit language design.) I have often felt that this was due to some spoken languages being easily extensible, and others forcing you into another language if you want to add a new concept. The two extremes seem to be English and Japanese. All popular programming languages seem to have an English heritage. In fact it is almost surprising that there are a few languages with more of a British background than American. (Algol, especially Algol 68, and Coral 66 come to mind.) There have been a few German and Russian programming languages, but none has made it into the mainstream. There have been a few languages from non-English speaking areas. SIMSCRIPT has a Scandinavian heritage. However, it is hard to contend that English is not the primary language in some areas of Scandinavia. Wirth who designed Pascal and Algol-W among other languages, was Dutch. But all those languages have a clear English heritage (and documentation). -- Robert I. Eachus "The war on terror is a different kind of war, waged capture by capture, cell by cell, and victory by victory. Our security is assured by our perseverance and by our sure belief in the success of liberty." -- George W. Bush