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2021-09-05

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#off-topic
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2021-09-05
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Nik04:09:25

In taxonomic sense, we have Language at root, we have programming languages for computers and languages like english for humans. Does anyone know formal name for human languages?

hiredman04:09:19

Programming languages are not languages, they are systems of symbolic logics

Nik05:09:15

At the level, I'm thinking about them, everything related to Language is system of symbols/codes, and Programming Langs are more logical.

hiredman04:09:40

"Natural languages" is a label people use (natural language processing, nlp)

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Nik05:09:58

Natural was the word I had forgotten, thanks

hiredman04:09:58

That leaves out con langs

Nik05:09:32

Do you mean this? - https://conlang.org

hiredman06:09:44

Yeah, not natural, and some of those have deliberately regular syntax

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hiredman04:09:09

If you go by grammars, the grammars of programming languages are formally defined (there is some program, where a program is a logic that encodes the rules of the grammar), where as who bothers trying do a formal model of languages humans use? It is all statistical machine learning stuff

Nik05:09:08

My understanding for Natural Language is that 1. due to how it got developed, it has tons of 'implementations' (per community). Basically everyone just adapted each older version to their own needs and the spread was exponentially. 2. the decision to use statistical machine learning stuff is based on trade-off (time/effort over value). Eg - one standard (or variant) of English is how Oxford defines it. You can try to do formal model of it if your goal suits that approach better (off the head, I can think of formal writing). But if your goal is around human conversation, ML approach turns out to be better overall.

hiredman05:09:40

Oh sure, people try to model human languages formally, but very little useful came of that for years of effort, and once the statistical stuff took off suddenly you have google translate

hiredman06:09:22

Like, the whole way we talk about programming language grammars, and the tools we use to describe them come from linguistic formalism, and those tools are totally great there, but the original domain of natural languages, just meh

Nik06:09:50

@U0NCTKEV8 Exactly. Yeah, I remember around 2016-2017 they switched and suddenly GTranslate wasn't just a cool gadget anymore.

Nik06:09:15

What wikipedia page says in so much words, I've created short story in my head. Ancient people got all these ideas and they found those so valuable, they were desperate to have others understand it. Everyone tried everything they felt was best way to express; with time, existing ones got optimized and new were invented, now we have all these mediums

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pavlosmelissinos09:09:17

@U029PC2K1HV If you're interested in language stuff, you probably want to take a look at Chomsky's work if you haven't already

Nik09:09:57

@UEQPKG7HQ I was exploring it as just a cool thought experiment, but thanks for the ref.