Ten things all languages have in common | Hacker News Reader

Ten things all languages have in common

blog.duolingo.com

12 pointsadrian_mrd12 comments

I wonder, in programming we have this concept of Turing completeness to describe the ability of languages to express a common standard of functionality. Is there an equivalent for communicative languages where all complete languages can express the same ideas and concepts as other complete languages?

There's the idea of “semantic primes”: https://wikiless.org/wiki/Semantic_primes?lang=en

This link would be useful to see on first page of HackerNews. The Duolingo article - not as much.

Define complete.

Turning machines are only complete on a self-referential way, within the limited scope of computation.

Human language is far more complex than a Turing Machine language or any other computational language.

They claim "All languages can communicate all ideas and feelings", but I think it is wrong. First of all there are ideas and especially feelings which can not be directly communicated with language at all. Surely you can label them and hope for the best, that the other side can relate to it, but you can not actually transmit the true idea or feeling you have. If language could truly communicate all ideas it should also be able to communicate all tacit knowledge, i.e. the term for the concept of "tacit knowledge" wouldnt be necessary to begin with. You can try to explain, but the explanation is only the map, not the territory.

Or to relate it with computing terminology:

Language is digital but existence is analog.

They don’t mean that there’s a single word in every language for every feeling, but that you can use the language to express it—or at least get asymptotically close.

All languages? Of course not. There are small languages which don't fit one or two categories. E.g., how can you have a dialect if there's only a handful of speakers in the same village left? Languages may have the capacity to develop dialects, but they don't necessarily have them.

And not all languages can communicate all ideas. Piraha is a famous example of a language without counting, and which also lacks abstract words.

To take this a step further, it seems easy to build a conlang that lacks one of these.

PR drivel.

The title made it seem like there would be interesting content like theory of grammar, but rather stupid (if not false) "facts" like all languages are equally valuable and equally complex.

It's duolingo. Article is about as surface level as any of their courses.

I think they should've specified “natural languages”. Some of these aren't necessarily true for constructed languages, let alone programming languages.

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