Irrational Exuberance

You are writing a comment about Spoken Languages, Blub, and Convenience, here is a quick summary:

A brief essay considering the link between spoken languages and programming languages and Paul Graham's theory of Blub.

You are responding to this comment written by Alex K. on May 26th 2008, 04:01.

One of the tenets of modern linguistics is that all languages are, roughly speaking, equally 'powerful', that is, capable of being used to express certain thoughts. Whether they are one word or not, we can and do certainly say things like 'the day before yesterday' withou batting an eyelid, and we are very aware of the level of formality of our speech and others - we would never speak to our boss as we speak to our colleagues, or to them as to our friends or to our children, or to our friends' children; English is as rich in registers as any other language, but we find these things expressed differently, changing our lexis and syntax differently to the choices made in say, Japanese. As a student of Italian and Latin I would be hard pressed to find a concrete example of Italian's poverty of thought and power. Your metaphor with programming languages is very neat, but natural languages follow a different path.

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