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

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

#101

Post by famouswaffles »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #97
famouswaffles wrote: post #35

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!

tone i guess isn't quite right. not in the chinese sense anyway. it's more stress. stress and intonation. it will be different for the last syllable.

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

#102

Post by [deleted] »

squirtlebonflow wrote: post #100
famouswaffles wrote: post #35

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…

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

[deleted]

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

#103

Post by famouswaffles »

squirtlebonflow wrote: post #100
famouswaffles wrote: post #35

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…

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

it's more that such information about the subject and whatever else is not stated until necessary and not more times than necessary.

If a mother were talking to the counsellor in school about her son's performance in school, and she suddenly asked 친구 있어요 ?, then she's almost certainly asking "Does he have friends?" and so on. If she happens to not be speaking about her son for whatever reason, she can make that known too by adding an extra word. Point is that it happens only when it needs to.

In English, Pulling up a "Friend Have?" will get a mark of confusion no matter the surrounding context. English doesn't prime you to expect information conveyed in such a manner.

also, i'm not op

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

#104

Post by solidsnack9000 »

carabiner wrote: post #66
solidsnack9000 wrote: post #9

There might be something to this, but the way the author diagrams it all is almost incomprehensible.

I know RPN and found it pretty clear what he's getting at. The stack and parentheses are pretty common way of expressing it order of ops. Don't know Korean though.

Yeah, the diagrams for Korean are what make it incomprehensible.

(a) No Romanization. (b) No translation for the constituent words.

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

#105

Post by ablob »

pessimizer wrote: post #62
aeternum wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does, many words have different age-based / status-based suffixes which adds a lot of unnecessary complexity. Numbers are also annoying as the counting numbers vs. quantity. From an information theory POV, we should really look at not just the complexity but the information density of a language. English has a lot of foolish rules, but the large vocabulary provides a much higher bandwidth than other languages. htt…

> English has a lot of foolish rules, but the large vocabulary provides a much higher bandwidth than other languages. I think that it's the grammar rules that make English fairly efficient, and also effectively add to its vocabulary, because word order in English is so strong that it twists whatever word you put in a particular position into whatever part of speech it needs to be. In less order-based languages you ha…

> We have a lot of words that mean exactly the same thing, but that we pretend mean different things.

They could have meant different things at some point in time. A Language can change drastically with time and if the people using the words stop differentiating between them it may appear as if it was only a game of pretend. This only becomes a problem when someone that doesn't see a difference in meaning communicates with someone that does.

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

#106

Post by sasaf5 »

neom wrote: 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!

It depends... if the topic of the sentence is the verb you need to wait there in suspense till it comes out.

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

#107

Post by yawaramin »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #77
neom wrote: 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!

Anyone can argue that any language is efficient based on some ability to express a (relatively) complex idea in (relatively) few words. In Sanskrit, for instance, one can express entire metaphyiscal/philosophical systems in a single word, using compounds, and in philosophical commentaries this is actually quite frequent (which is what makes reading philosophy in Sanskrit so difficult, because everything is so condens…

Yeah but there is a difference between efficiency of theoretical concepts and efficiency of expressing practical tasks.

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

#108

Post by kaladin-jasnah »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #80
ryukafalz wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Thank you, you've answered a question I've had about different languages for years as a monolingual English speaker! I've always…

Some languages don’t even use word order as the primary mechanism for forming sentences. Latin and Ancient Greek are two examples. They are “inflected” meaning you change the word to show how it functions in a sentence. Pronouns in English still function this way a little (for example he = subject, him = object).

Are you describing case systems/declension here?

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

#109

Post by carabiner »

ssnistfajen wrote: post #56
wobby_sobby wrote: post #13

This is going to make a great r/badlinguistics post

Exactly. This should be re-titled "agglutinative languages explained in programming terms".

Programmers love to come up with abstractions that they see in other fields. 99% of the time these are well-known inside the field. Reminds me of that medical paper that got published where the researcher rediscovered numerical integration.

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

#110

Post by ehnto »

ryukafalz wrote: post #75
yongjik wrote: 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. Thank you, you've answered a question I've had about different languages for years as a monolingual English speaker! I've always…

Just for your curiosity, my favourite explanation of Japanese sentence structure is that it is an outside in language, where English is inside out. Since Japanese doesn't follow a conrete word order like SVO, it was very helpful to see it that way.

The kids had lunch in the park at 12pm today.

vs

The kids, Today at 12pm in the park had lunch.

The grander more ephemeral concepts go first in Japanese, with some common exceptions (persons tend to go at the start as it does in the example). In English we tend to start with the closest concept and work our way out.

That really helped my understanding and sentence creation.

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