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Comment by astrange | Hacker News Reader

> What's great or genius is that this "phrase", or function, is ALSO a chunk. and you can combine those chunks together in the same manner even if they are functions. This is like LISP: functions are data and data are functions.

These two sentences have no apparent relation, except that you said they did. Spoken language sentences do not evaluate each other and none of them are apparently functions. Also, spoken languages don't have punctuation…

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I think (s)he's saying that human languages have composable, tree-like structures. There's nothing Lisp-specific about that, though. Prolog would work just as well, or ML (human languages may be statically typed), Joy, etc.

Also, I'm an amateur linguist at best, but the recursive structures in human languages generally don't get more than a couple levels deep - the linguistic stack seems to get smashed pretty easily.

> but the recursive structures in human languages generally don't get more than a couple levels deep - the linguistic stack seems to get smashed pretty easily.

Sentences yes (figure 7 chunk limit), semantic associations tokened by words, no.

> Spoken language sentences do not evaluate each other and none of them are apparently functions

I tried to clarify the proper analogy at the end. LISP is not directly analogous to spoken language (the surface level), LISP is directly analogous to human thought (that interprets language internally). This was really the topic for an article and not a comment rant, sorry.

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