Oh, gosh, the usual Hindutva nonsense. Let me first of all dispel any notion that I don't like learning languages "for fun." See my Hacker News user profile for more details on what languages I have learned. I have learned enough facts about Sanskrit and the various languages that are written in the Devanagari alphabet to know 1) The written history of Sanskrit is much less that 3,000 years long. (The historiography…
I will just counter 5) with http://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/46....
But if you like a one-to-one correspondence between spoken language sentence structure and the usual first-order logic notation, Chinese is a good place to start.
Umm. Wat? Care to elaborate more? Any papers? Also, first-order logic has many grammars and different families of syntax. Postfix, prefix, infix, graphical, linear, controlled English-based Attempto Controlled English. It makes absolutely no sense to say Chinese syntax is more logical than Sanskrit.
A language is logical if it has a controlled syntax (at the least, well-defined semantics is the holy grail for AI). Attempto ACE (http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/site/) and http://www.jfsowa.com/clce/specs.htm are logic languages. Chinese has no controlled syntax. Sanskrit is the only natural language to have a controlled syntax. Chomsky even credits his famous notation to a Sanskrit grammarian, Panini. Does any of your other languages have this advantage?
Since you accuse other HN-ers of being Hindutva posters, can I do the same and accuse you of being a paid Chinese shill? Stop with the unsubstantiated intellectually low-grade vacuous negativity.
Once again, please keep your biases at home and keep HN a civil place. I can't believe your glib uncivil FUD-ish comment is top ranked. Ugh.
One wonders what kind of mind would feverishly advocate for any language to go extinct.