Live data from Hacker News

Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

m.post.naver.com

91–100 of 121 posts

Re: Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

#91
post #4

Having spent the last 5 years learning Korean, I've grown to find it an incredibly efficient language. 맥주 한 잔 주세요 Beer one please 화장실은 어디에요? Toilet where? 와이파이 있어요? wifi is here? You can process and even start answering someone before they've finished their sentence. By contrast in English, I'd say "Could I have another beer please?" - tell me what you need up front!

All I learned from reading this is that your translation skills are abysimal. I only know the script and can tell that the encoded information is a little more complex. > You can process and even start answering someone before they've finished their sentence That would likely break the Curry-Howard-Correspondance. So I can only concure, it is "incredible". Good on you if you reached a point where you don't notice the…

> Curry-Howard-Correspondance

Did you mean the Church-Turing thesis? (I still don’t really see the connection though….)

Re: Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

#92
post #4

Having spent the last 5 years learning Korean, I've grown to find it an incredibly efficient language. 맥주 한 잔 주세요 Beer one please 화장실은 어디에요? Toilet where? 와이파이 있어요? wifi is here? You can process and even start answering someone before they've finished their sentence. By contrast in English, I'd say "Could I have another beer please?" - tell me what you need up front!

All these can be said as succinctly in English though. "one beer please" is enough to place an order, and the rest is just decorative. Does Korean not have more complex / ceremonial speech patterns?

A large part of this is cultural, not linguistic. Japanese syntax has just as much structure to it as English syntax. The difference is that ellipsis is socially accepted in Japan to a much greater extent than in Anglophone societies. You could generate abbreviated sentences in English, which listeners could understand just as well, but people would think you were being rude.

Re: Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

#93
post #4

Having spent the last 5 years learning Korean, I've grown to find it an incredibly efficient language. 맥주 한 잔 주세요 Beer one please 화장실은 어디에요? Toilet where? 와이파이 있어요? wifi is here? You can process and even start answering someone before they've finished their sentence. By contrast in English, I'd say "Could I have another beer please?" - tell me what you need up front!

Tea, Earl Grey, hot

Re: Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

#94
post #90

Off-topic, but what is it with this site ending lines in the middle of words? Like "c (newline) an" or "bu (newline) t". This is really hard to read!

It's probably because Naver is a Korean website, with some English localization. In Korean, it's fine to split a word to a new line almost anywhere. I'm guessing it's using the same configuration even for English.

Re: Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

#95
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these can be said as succinctly in English though. "one beer please" is enough to place an order, and the rest is just decorative. Does Korean not have more complex / ceremonial speech patterns?

Oh, and there's one really succinct way of expression that's not found in English: One can say something like 난 라면 - literally "I am ramen" (or something like that - it's a bit fuzzy because the "be" verb is omitted). It would be a ridiculous sentence by itself, but if your friend just asked "I'll have noodles, how about you?" then it's a perfectly fine response. Similarly you could even say 난 프랑스 ("I am France") if…

English has one word answers for those questions.

It’s just conversationally dry and people will assume you’re not interested.

Re: Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

#96
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Korean has a crapload of complex speech patterns (degree of politeness - that's sheer madness) but the nice(?) thing about it is that it all comes at the end. So you can start your sentence without even deciding if it's a statement or a question. E.g., 오늘 그 식당 열어요 Today that restaurant is open. 오늘 그 식당 열어요? Is that restaurant open today? 오늘 그 식당 열 것 같아요. I guess that restaurant is open today. 오늘 그 식당 열 것 같다고 들었어요. I…

> In fact, learning English as a native Korean speaker, one of the greatest difficulty was asking questions - you can't just start your sentence and make it a question later, you have to mentally pause, construct your question in your head, and then invert the first word! It took me years. This is quite interesting to hear, but I assume you mean that you always knew if you were going ask a question before you asked i…

Working with many IT workers from Indian origin, their English always frustrated me in that when they ask questions they won't say it in the interrogative form. It was always in the declarative.

"We are deploying the code, right?" versus "Are we deploying the code?"

"This is Boolean, correct?" versus "Is this Boolean?"

Is this cultural, or are they afraid to ask questions? It's almost as if by stating the question in the declarative form they are hedging their doubt. As an American English speaker, I find this annoying. If you don't know, be bold to ask straight, don't doublespeak it.

Re: Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English can be pretty much as efficient... It's up to the social context on how much you want to dress it up.

No it really can't. It's somewhat hard to explain without going hard into grammar but if someone tried complex communication in English, how you would in Korean, communication would break down very quickly. In Korean, Plural markers basically don't exist, Articles don't exist and possessive determiners are very few and only typically inserted when determining the meaning would be difficult otherwise. Strictly speakin…

Hold up, if information is being encoded on tone, and tonal marks aren't part of the written language, then you've at least somewhat bait and switched us. Its not literally one identical phrase for 4 situations. Its several slightly different phrases that happen to not have their difference transcribed within this writing system. The information is still there!

Re: Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these can be said as succinctly in English though. "one beer please" is enough to place an order, and the rest is just decorative. Does Korean not have more complex / ceremonial speech patterns?

Yeah....It gets a lot more sparse Strictly speaking 친구 있어요 ? means Friend Have ? And you would say exactly that for any of these English equivalents "Do they have friends ?" "Do you have a friend ?" "Do you have friends ?" "Does he have a friend ?" And so on. Plurality as a special marker doesn't really exist. Possessive and Article Determiners don't really exist either. Articles don't exist at all. Possessive marker…

Sure but counting words is not a measure of brevity. The actual temporal length of the utterance is what matters.

When I speak English it sounds more like "d'yv'n'e friends"? 5 syllables, most very short

Re: Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

#99
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it really can't. It's somewhat hard to explain without going hard into grammar but if someone tried complex communication in English, how you would in Korean, communication would break down very quickly. In Korean, Plural markers basically don't exist, Articles don't exist and possessive determiners are very few and only typically inserted when determining the meaning would be difficult otherwise. Strictly speakin…

Hold up, if information is being encoded on tone, and tonal marks aren't part of the written language, then you've at least somewhat bait and switched us. Its not literally one identical phrase for 4 situations. Its several slightly different phrases that happen to not have their difference transcribed within this writing system. The information is still there!

It's not tone - at least not in the same sense Chinese is a tonal language. Standard Korean does not have tones. Maybe a better term would be intonation: it's similar to how the same English sentence could have multiple meanings, e.g., "I certainly did not see him" vs. "I certainly did not see him."

GP's example sentence would have just two different way to say it, either a plain statement or a question. In either case the pronoun is omitted, so you're supposed to infer it from context.

Re: Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English can be pretty much as efficient... It's up to the social context on how much you want to dress it up.

No it really can't. It's somewhat hard to explain without going hard into grammar but if someone tried complex communication in English, how you would in Korean, communication would break down very quickly. In Korean, Plural markers basically don't exist, Articles don't exist and possessive determiners are very few and only typically inserted when determining the meaning would be difficult otherwise. Strictly speakin…

Curious how your definition of efficiency is somehow "by not encoding information about the subject, such as their relation or plurality, we are able to use less words than a language that does encode that information".

It's not an equal comparison matey

Post reply on HN