Language Quirks

A programming language and a spoken language share many things in common. They both have a lexicon, that is, a collection of words that form that language. In spoken languages that lexicon is basically everything that's in the dictionary and all the slang and informal expressions that don't make it into the final publication. In programming languages the lexicon is essentially the reserved words that the language uses to refer to the functionality that it provides.  Spoken languages have complex grammatical rules for the order of words and how they come together, while programming languages have syntax and orders of operation that determines how what you have written is interpreted by the compiler or the interpreter depending on the language.

I first learned to program when I was 6 years old, in BASIC on an old Amstrad PC, I can't remember how old I was when I first tried to learn another spoken language. The only definitive answer I can give is at the age of 11 when I started High School each Form Class studied a language, my Form Class studied Irish for 5 years and when I left High School I was fluent. That was 20 years ago this year, and although I still have the certificates that say I am fluent, I can barely string a sentence together because I have had zero use for the language in the last two decades. Each year in High School was divided into 4 Form Classes, 2 of those studied Irish and 2 studied French, I would rather have studied French if I am honest as I would have been able to actually use it.

At some point in my teenage years whilst still in High School I decided to try and learn Spanish, self taught which was very slow progress because there was a lack of quality online resources at the time. This was 1999 to 2004, when the only Internet access I had was through Dial-up and most websites weren't rich in media yet, Web 2.0 was still a nascent idea, approaches to embedding media weren't standardised yet, while some websites had embedded RealMedia players, some used Windows Media OCX extensions, and others had QuickTime plugins to provide video services, as for Flash which was still owned by Macromedia, it was largely used for animations, it wasn't until broadband internet gained market dominance that Flash based video players became common.

Still outside of academia, Spanish was the language I made most progress with. Since then I have added Latin, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese to the list of languages I've made a concerted effort to learn. There have been many more that I have dabbled in, Greek, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Catalan, Russian, Czech, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese (Simplified), among others.

The thing I find most interesting about language learning is the etymology of words and the history of languages as it intersects with the history of the countries that speak those languages predominantly. I was born in the UK, in Northern Ireland to be exact, English is my first language, ironically learning about other languages forces you to examine your understanding of your own language, in order to translate effectively you need to be able to interpret what you want to say, or rather, you need to be able to think about what you want to communicate rather than what you want to say, because understanding what you want to communicate first lets you connect mentally with the target language and its methods of expressing that desire or that internal state.

To put that in plain English you need to stop thinking "What is the word for Lime in Spanish" and ask "What do Spanish speakers call a lime?" because the answer isn't always simple, with this example for instance Lemon (yellow) and Lime (green) translates to "Limón" and "Lima" respectively if you're in Europe and speaking Spanish derived from Castilian, but if you're in Latin America particularly in Mexico the two are swapped, "Lima" means Lemon and "Limón" means Lime - this is just the result of cultural differences similar to the way a Mars Bar in the UK is called a Milky Way in the US, and a Three Musketeers Bar in the US is called a Milky Way in the UK.

I've always referred to English as a "Bastard Language" when people ask in depth questions about it, the antiquated term "Bastard" meant an illegitimate child usually of a monarch that was born out of wedlock [before marriage] - that pretty much sums up English as a language, it is the amalgamation of every conquest of Britain, that although they conquered the land they never conquered the language. What I mean by this, is that when Britain was conquered by the Romans, the Danish, the French, the Vikings, the Celts, the Anglo-Saxons, and however many others I fail to recall, each brought with them their own lexicon which was incorporated into the language of the land, but never quite replaced entirely the existing language.

What you end up with is English as it exists today, the illegitimate child of dozens of languages and thousands of years of history - that's before you even consider the impact of Imperialism, Colonialism, and Britain's own efforts to go from conquered to conqueror and the influx of immigrants and slaves who brought their own language and history with them.

Sometimes the simplest of things can lead you down a rabbit hole. This morning a conversation about the difference between a cup and a mug lead me through the etymology of "cup" to the Romans through Latin "copo", and through the etymology of "mug" to the Anglo-Saxons from Low German "mokke" the same origin shared by the Scandinavian variants which isn't totally surprising considering English is a Germanic language, in other words if the origin isn't immediately obvious then it usually comes from German.

Learning other languages and stumbling across their idiosyncrasies gives you a glimpse into their complicated history. In Portuguese for instance "Tu comes banana" stumped me on Duolingo when I was expecting the answer to be "Tu comes bananas" when prompted to translate "Do you eat bananas?" it was the fact it has to be singular not plural despite referring to multiple that threw me off, and again this set me off down a rabbit hole trying to figure out why - the answer as it stands, is because this particular construct is known as the Generic Singular which is a third form of counting nouns, which uses the singular form of a noun to refer to a collective, in other words using "banana" in this context means all bananas in a similar way to human, humans, and humanity, each refer to people in the singular, plural, and collective form. As for where this originates from, that's thanks to Latin which really fucking loved classifying nouns - if you've ever tried learning noun declensions you might be feeling triggered around about now, conjugating verbs is frustrating enough, but essentially conjugating the noun too is taking the piss as we would say in the UK.

I should also add that it's at moments like this when I consider the possibility that I have undiagnosed autism because there are times when "it just is" serves as a barrier to learning for me, where my brain responds with "No, I'm going to need more than that" and won't let me proceed without finding out exactly why it is the way it is - I remember when I was in school, Maths was one of my favourite subjects because everything made sense and nothing went unexplained until the day we learned about square roots which we learned how to use a calculator to find - you can probably guess how I reacted, with the question "okay but how does the calculator work that out?" which my teacher wouldn't explain at the time (I was in Primary School and I have a suspicion she didn't actually know) - I eventually got my answer years later in High School when I had the best Maths teacher I have ever studied with, who also happened to be my Form Tutor. There was never a Maths question I had for her in 5 years that she couldn't give a detailed answer to, her response was that the calculator uses an algorithm to find the answer, some simply use trial and improvement which she showed us how to do, and others use optimised algorithms to find it quicker - an explanation as simple as this would have been enough for me in Primary School to get passed that stumbling block.

Getting passed those mental blocks when learning a language can be difficult, this is actually something ChatGPT is surprisingly helpful with because I can explain in my own words what I want to know and it can give me enough information as a foundation to go and read more about the reasoning behind the answer. I also have to say my progress with Duolingo has been much more consistent when I can ask ChatGPT why something was marked wrong. Duolingo isn't particularly informative when it comes to explaining why something is wrong, to try and rectify this it has launched a tool to do this natively within the app, also powered by AI, but it requires a Duolingo Max subscription which at the moment is twice the price of Super Duolingo and I can't justify paying that for a feature in-app when I can just ask ChatGPT for free and get the same result.