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Japanese explained to programmers

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Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#201

Post by philsnow »

philsnow wrote: post #196

The author has discovered (linguistic) morphology. The `setRole` function he describes compiles to various morphemes in Japanese like は, を, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphology_(linguistics) We have this in English too except remarkably little of it actually comes out. Pluralization and possession being marked with -(e)s and -'s suffixes, and "subject-verb agreement" (one wouldn't say "the birds eat s the fo…

To abuse the idea in the article, you could imagine the layers I mentioned in the brain are various stages of a thought compiler, and English is one front-end. In this analogy, C/Java/whatever are the "thought" and linked executables / bytecode bundles are the "words".

Some languages share more intermediate compiler stages than others (Latin, Italian, French) whereas share a lot fewer (English and Japanese come to mind).

One thing I like about this formulation is that humanity doesn't all need to have the same meat / "hardware" in their brains at the bottom layer (which is kind of unsatisfying and less-plausible, and makes me think of 2001: A Space Odyssey), as long as there is interoperability at the highest layer.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#202

Post by PuppyTailWags »

presentation wrote: post #97
hsn915 wrote: post #42

Honestly this feels like "programmer circle jerk" material. I love Japanese. I love it so much that I (accidentally?) moved to Japan. But it really has nothing to do with programming. It's a natural langauge with all the idiosyncrasies of natural languages. In fact I'd say that English in comparison feels like a man-made language purpose built for math and technology.

Agreed with the assessment of the article, but I find Japanese to be significantly more logical than English/other languages I’ve learned. Just, the way it’s typically taught makes little sense usually. Recommend Cure Dolly on YouTube for some high quality explanation of the inner logic behind the Japanese language in a way accessible to western language speakers.

I think it's not significantly more logical than other languages. For example, there's no rational-designed reason to have different ways of describing the number of an object based on the object's qualities. "I have 4 books" and "I have 4 apples" shouldn't have different ways of describing the number 4. It's purely based off of organic growth and provenance of the language itself.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#203

Post by bernawil »

the_af wrote: post #179
Symmetry wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too bad the Romans only used five vowel sounds and left us with an alphabet that has trouble expressing the however many sounds English has.

Yet Spanish is a very expressive language, and it has no trouble expressing whatever you want using fewer vowels (note there are more than just five vowel sounds even in Spanish, it's just that variations don't have different meaning). There's a lot of sound variation in regional dialects of Spanish, from country to country and even regions within a country. People pronounce vowels and consonants differently, and eve…

what's cool is that regional dialects have different vowel/consonant pronunciation but the differences are almost completely consistent internally and between the dialects. Like, Peruvians pronounce anything with "y" or "ll" like an English "j" and Argentines like "sh", always. Everything maps 1 to 1.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#204

Post by franciscop »

conductr wrote: post #172
franciscop wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly my thoughts. While not fluent for professional settings, I live in Japan and speak enough for everyday life and I can tell that the Japanese I studied at school from first principles and more "literature-like" has nothing to do with the one used day to day, and e.g. that one has nothing to do with the one used in manga. You can do the same exercise as the author with almost all languages, the only small advan…

I don't speak Japanese, so this is kind of half baked, but I find the OP description of "transform polite present tense" explanation a little confusing. Or at least, maybe it assumes we don't do that in English? Or this is using a bad example? Let me explain. "I eat beef" is not something many native English speakers would say, or only in unusual contexts. We may say, "I am a beef eater" or simply "I like beef". Some…

A bit that you can get away with learning: in English, the things foreigners start learning (and probably you in elementary school about the language and its structure are closer to the actual English usage compared to other languages like Spanish and Japanese. In my example, the textbook beginner "I eat beef" is very out of place usually in the 3 languages, but in English "I like/love beef" are perfectly valid examples that still follow the same basic/beginner structure of "I eat beef" and are valid. In Japanese and Spanish, you have to change the whole sentence structure to not sound like a robot.

(English grammar being simpler in this trifecta, but then in exchange you have the crazy pronunciation learning of English that I found out I would never "fully learn" and nobody really does in English, since you even have literal competitions (spelling bees) where people show off how good they are at it, and with jokes still happening between professionals like "is it 'data' or 'data'?").

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#205

Post by singlow »

hsn915 wrote: post #42

Honestly this feels like "programmer circle jerk" material. I love Japanese. I love it so much that I (accidentally?) moved to Japan. But it really has nothing to do with programming. It's a natural langauge with all the idiosyncrasies of natural languages. In fact I'd say that English in comparison feels like a man-made language purpose built for math and technology.

I feel that this is a common misconception by many language learners, and it is not their fault. Usually when we learn about a language in a non-organic setting, such as a classroom, we learn mostly about the "rules". But the rules are usually just generalizations that cover a large portion of usage, while the irregularities are often learned later or are segregated as "special" cases even though they are often the most common constructions. As a result I often hear people say things like, "this language has pure vowels," or, "this language has very consistent word order," but in fact it is mostly because some teacher emphasized the most regular forms, or the places where it contrasted from their native language.

I am not suggesting that all languages are equally irregular, or illogical. But I do think that many times the differences are exaggerated.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#206

Post by PuppyTailWags »

conductr wrote: post #172
franciscop wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly my thoughts. While not fluent for professional settings, I live in Japan and speak enough for everyday life and I can tell that the Japanese I studied at school from first principles and more "literature-like" has nothing to do with the one used day to day, and e.g. that one has nothing to do with the one used in manga. You can do the same exercise as the author with almost all languages, the only small advan…

I don't speak Japanese, so this is kind of half baked, but I find the OP description of "transform polite present tense" explanation a little confusing. Or at least, maybe it assumes we don't do that in English? Or this is using a bad example? Let me explain. "I eat beef" is not something many native English speakers would say, or only in unusual contexts. We may say, "I am a beef eater" or simply "I like beef". Some…

In Japanese, the formalizations of polite speech vs impolite speech are significantly more rigorous than in English. So much so that different words and grammatical changes to words occur. You can insult someone by saying "I watched my boss be given an anniversary present by their boss" by using the word 'give' word which implies the recipient or the giver are a lower social status than you the observer.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#207

Post by philsnow »

ickoonite wrote: post #163
makeitdouble wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think parent’s use of ”logical” instead of “complex” better fits the bill. For instance, on the 1 onyomi with 1 kunyomi average, there’s no specific logic making it that way (I actually doubt it’s only one of each in average), and there’s no limit on how many readings a kanji can get, people can randomly add new readings and popularize them. It’s not a problem in practice because not knowing most words’ reading has…

> there’s no limit on how many readings a kanji can get, people can randomly add new readings and popularize them. Precisely! It is insane. Song lyrics are a case in point. It is the height of erudition to contrive a novel way to write some verb or other. Furigana are essential for karaoke.

> Song lyrics are a case in point. It is the height of erudition to contrive a novel way to write some verb or other.

This is intensely interesting -- do I understand this correctly, that what happens is a songwriter uses a verb (or I guess any word) and writes it down as a different set of kanji(+kana) than how it's usually written, and the new form is confusing at first to a reader of the lyrics, and the new form evokes some different emotion or context because of the choice of kanji?

Can you think of an example? I want to see for myself.

Wordplay is delicious and I've never heard of this kind of it. . o O ( this had better not awaken anything in me. )

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#208

Post by franciscop »

gomibako wrote: post #183
hsn915 wrote: post #42

Honestly this feels like "programmer circle jerk" material. I love Japanese. I love it so much that I (accidentally?) moved to Japan. But it really has nothing to do with programming. It's a natural langauge with all the idiosyncrasies of natural languages. In fact I'd say that English in comparison feels like a man-made language purpose built for math and technology.

I would agree if i had just read the article, but i do remember being awed the first time i heard a Japanese person talking to the digital assistant in their phone (~10 years ago at that) really fast and the digital assistant understanding everything flawlessly and thinking - Japanese is very well suited to this! Not only how sentences are composed, but the diction as well. Of course you can be really ambiguous and v…

I would say that's (like in Spanish) thanks to the fact that Japanese is a very phonetic language. You can easily transliterate it by listening, since most sounds correspond to a single written character, and the reverse, when in English a single letter like "a" might have 5 different pronunciations.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#209

Post by bernawil »

brozaman wrote: post #123
davidmurdoch wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of its exactness. Like with words like course coarse mussel muscle altar alter idle idol very vary presents presence, etc. /s

I know you're being sarcastic, but as a Spanish native speaker I'd say English precisely excels on how well it handles ambiguity and certainty. I also hate with passion that it's not written as it sounds (I think everyone who comes from a language with very regular pronunciation will tell you this) but I don't think this is a real issue on a daily basis. On the other hand Spanish handles other things better. I'd say…

> I'd say English precisely excels on how well it handles ambiguity and certainty.

I'm curious about this. I mean, English doesn't even have different words for singular/plural "you".

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#210

Post by w-m »

iraldir wrote: post #87
w-m wrote: post #37

As it's an article about language, I hope you don't mind me pointing out that there's an additional h in > an introduction to how different language can be has different as It's probably just a simple typo here. But in my head it immediately sounds like a French speaker overcompensating, by adding H's where there aren't any [0], as I have heard this so many times. As a French speaker learning English as a second lang…

I definitely know it's wrong, but whether it's a pure typo, or an overcompensation which my brain somehow converted into typing, I wouldn't know. That's definitely a thing though (hilariously shown in what the fuck france: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzJWugjchhQ )

Ha, of course he would talk about this. But I hadn't seen this one yet, thanks for the link!

I've been to his show, my favorite bit was the one about carrelage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIqVY1SwXls

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