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 Ed on May 26th 2008, 12:07.

I'd be very surprised to find out that the Romance languages did not keep a constant "global expressivity" -- gaining complexities in other areas while losing, some complexities of Classical Latin.

I don't know enough of the Romance languages to point to more than a trivial instance: Classical Latin had no articles, definite or indefinite. All the Romance languages, I think, have articles. That's an example of expressivity gained, and I suspect there are many more.

If you're interested in discussion of the areas where natural languages have unique expressive possibilities, you might check out the work of Anna Weirzbicka. I don't find her theory of "semantic primes" literally convincing in all its details, but she has used it as a powerful tool to carefully explore various languages' unique expressions, "cultural keywords," including "mate" in Australian, "amaeru" in Japanese, comparing the subtle differences in meaning of Polish, Russian, and German words for "homeland," and other issues. She's a lexicographer so she talks more about words than about syntactic/grammatical possibilities, but it's still very interesting stuff.

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@@ ruby
def a (b, c):
  b * c
end
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**this is bold**
*this is italics*

1. This is an
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* And an unordered
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