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creole

recommend book⇒The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

Steven Pinker

978-0-06-095833-6

paperback

birth

1954-09-18 age:63

978-0-688-12141-9

hardcover

publisher

Harper Perennial

978-0-06-203252-2

eBook

published

2000-11-07

978-1-4558-3970-4

audio

B0049B1VOU

kindle

This is one of the most fascinating books I ever read. It turns out that the brain has hardware for parsing language. Shortly after birth, the parsing engine gets configured to the particular language it hears. Humans without access to a common language will spontaneously develop a pidgin language and within a generation or two will develop a full creole with a complex grammar.

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In his book, The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker points out several remarkable things which may impact future computer language design.

The human brain is hardwired with grammar processing wetware. It has to be configured for a particular human language early in life.
If a group of people are forced together from different linguistic backgrounds they will create a very simplified language called a pidgin.
However, the generation of children speaking pidgin will within one generation enrich the pidgin with a full fledged grammar and vocabulary making it a true language in its own right. A language created this way is called a creole.

I wonder if with our supposedly simple artificial computer languages, we inadvertently bypass our hardwired syntax parsers. No wonder we make so many programming mistakes. We should be aiming for languages more like natural spoken languages that don’t depend so much on fussy punctuation. Natural spoken languages evolve with new vocabulary and short-forms introduced on-the-fly.

Bali

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