My question to you: Is there a Python equivalent spoken language? For some time now I have been thinking about the idea that every philosophical problem is inherently a linguistics problem, as two people must use words to define the ideas in their heads, and words are the medium in which ideas propagate. So, is there a spoken language where two people who understand it can efficiently and accurately translate the ideas in their head to each other? Or is spoken language just too complicated for us to understand in fully?
The language has a very consistent grammar, all the conjugations are predictable
While most of its words are of French origin, Its syntax is a little different: La Table = Tab la. Le téléphone = Telefòn lan. J'ai envi de manger = mwen anvi manje
It's written phonetically. No surprises when it comes to pronunciation.
It's modern. It's one of the youngest languages in the world.
The language emerged from contact between French settlers and enslaved Africans during the Atlantic slave trade in the French colony of Saint-Domingue.
Probably suffering from the blub paradox, but English seems pretty good for conveying ideas. It has a lot of unfortunate spelling and some weird conjugations, but the basic sentence has a subject, object, and verb, and then, it rather promiscuously imports words, which means we have a word for everything, and if we don't, we'll just take it from any language that does, no problem. This ideal language must have a large, precise vocabulary, like English (though you can argue the "precise" bit). English can really cut through to a point, in my opinion.
One of the topics in McWhorter's research is about how languages become streamlined when they are learned by adults as a second language. English, Mandarin, and Swahili all show evidence of this (for English, it seems related to the Vikings).
Related post:
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/06/co...
For people interested in human languages (or people who don't yet know they're interested in human languages), you might enjoy the courses he's done for Great Courses (paid but worth it, available on ~Amazon):
(1) The Story of Language: covers the topic of language evolution; how languages change over time, how new words are introduced, how languages mix (due to e.g. invasions), pidgins/creoles
(2) Language Families of the World: a survey of what languages currently exist, features of languages in different families
It's an agglutinative [0] language which basically means instead of being separated morphemes are "concatenated" together. For example (from the wiki page):
> the word evlerinizden, or "from your houses", consists of the morphemes ev-ler-iniz-den, literally translated morpheme-by-morpheme as house-plural-your-from.
It also has a simple subject-object verb structure without a grammatical gender.
I find it quite simple to wrap your head around, in the same way python is the go-to language to learn programming, I think it's pretty easy for beginners :).
i think this heavily depends on your mother-tongue / native-language(s) ...
there are often similarities between languages - for example its easy for an italian speaking person to learn spanish and vice-verca ...
but i think its definitly not easy for a non-european language person to learn lets say english or any other european language.
other example: as a german native speaker there are several similar languages - which sometimes are just more of a "slang", or historically missing sound-shifts ... from the south german/austrian "bavarian german", swiz-german to languages like dutch or the belgian language similar to dutch - flemisch? ...
As an example, in my family, there is no general agreement as to how many “holes” a straw has, or a spoon, or a cup, or a donut. If we can’t even precisly define what a hole is, then basically everything we say is ambiguous.
Mind you, you wouldn’t know what it means but you could read and badly pronounce it.
The rest of the language and pronunciation isn’t super easy for western speakers but reading is literally than a day.