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Agglutinative Language

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Re: Agglutinative Language

#31

Post by chousuke »

Jhsto wrote: post #15
Bootwizard wrote: post #5

Can someone here explain this in an easier to understand way? This was a bit too dense for my understanding...

The article notes that in some languages it is possible to form sentences by chaining appendixes to them. An example in Finnish: - jousta (normal form of the verb run) - juoksen (I run) - juoksentelen (I run around) - juoksentelisinkohan (I wonder should I run around) - juostaankohammekohaan (I wonder do we run) The two later forms are very rarely used, and I have no idea whether the last form is even correct. I have…

"Juostaankohammekohaan" is not right. It should probably be either "juoksemmekohan" "I wonder if we will run" or "juostaankohan" "I wonder if it will be run" (passive voice).

The frequentative forms would be "juoksentelemmekohan" and "juoksennellaankohan" respectively.

Re: Agglutinative Language

#32

Post by jhanschoo »

bonoboTP wrote: post #14

I often wonder how much of a head start the isolating nature of English gave for computing. It allowed ignoring a lot of inflectional and agglutinative complexity. Concretely I mean it's very easy to generate text using sentence templates. Just plug in words and it works out. "The $process_name has completed running." "Like $username's comment" "Ban $username". Relatedly, I think focusing NLP efforts on English masks…

Possibly less than you think. (I'm not addressing the NLP part)

For example, every language is already used to math formatting. Programming languages draw more inspiration from math formatting than English.

That leaves naming. Here agglutinative languages should have an advantage. You can have more natural ways to describe roles like how in English we may have caller and callee, rather than more clumsily camel-casing something like sumOfLists.

> linguistics and especially computational linguistics and NLP would have evolved in a non-Anglo culture, e.g. Slavic or Hungarian.

Probably not much different, except that more elements of morphology are treated together with syntax.

> Concretely I mean it's very easy to generate text using sentence templates. Just plug in words and it works out. "The $process_name has completed running." "Like $username's comment" "Ban $username".

If computing were primarily championed by a fusional language (agglutinative languages usually have somewhat "clean" morphology), I imagine that libraries for inflection will be more prominently used. Like in English where more professional apps use a pluralizer library. One natural API for an inflection API is as a fluent API.

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