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0 pointsgeofft5y ago0 comments

I thought the person that you're replying to made a very good point about Esperanto. Why do we teach linguistics with messy real-world languages instead of conlangs that most clearly distill the principles we want to teach?

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Mediterraneo105y ago

One of the chief concerns in introductory linguistics programs is introducing students to the great typological diversity of the world's languages. There are a number of different ways in which languages can inflect (or not), structure word order, derive new words from existing vocabulary, etc. Conlangs, however, tend to choose a very limited set of approaches, for example agglutinative inflection is popular because creators feel it makes the language easier to learn. Just as some North American departments have been mocked for doing all their theoretical work purely on the basis of English (or other European languages), using a conlang would make students miss out on the full range of human linguistic expression.

All human languages have at least some irregularities, and the way in which speakers deal with those irregularities is an interesting series of phenomena in itself, but most conlangs aim to be fully regular. A similar situation holds for phonology in which most languages have a developed system of allophony and sandhi, but conlangs typically don't aim to represent those phenomena at all.

geofftOP5y ago

Right. And doesn't that apply to programming languages too? Aren't the ways that Python is irregular to support real-world needs (the Zen of Python even says "Practicality beats purity") worth CS students studying?

fishmaster5y ago

No, because this is computer science and not software engineering. The best introductory language is the one that allows to express the concepts that are presented in the cleanest way possible. If you want "real-world needs" then drop out and work for a software company. The purpose of universities is not to cater to the needs of industry - to pump out code monkeys.

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StreamBright5y ago

Interesting point. You are mixing up teaching language with teaching linguistics. Teaching linguistics usually includes phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, discourse, typology and semiotics. Quite similar to teaching computer science. The concepts are independent of the implementation. In this context using Python is bad because it has a very limited set of concepts that worth knowing. Racket has many more. In the context of working in the industry Python _experience_ might be more valuable, but it has nothing to do with how good it is to tech computer science.

https://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/~hana/teaching/2015wi-ling/01-Intro...

geofftOP5y ago

OK, so you're saying that in universities that teach linguistics (instead of teaching languages), they do in fact strongly prefer to teach in idealized conlangs like Esperanto and avoid working with irregular real-world languages?

Can you give me an example of such a university curriculum?

StreamBright5y ago

No, I am saying, universities teaching linguistics are teaching concepts. They might teach how some of these concepts are in a particular language, quite often they choose the language of the country they reside in. It would be hard to teach advanced concepts in Python. That is all.

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naasking5y ago

> Why do we teach linguistics with messy real-world languages instead of conlangs that most clearly distill the principles we want to teach?

Because we're not teaching language science in that case, we're teaching proficiency in an actual language.

An industry language is fine for a software engineering degree, or a technician degree of some sort.

geofftOP5y ago

Just to make sure I understand you right - you're claiming that the academic discipline of linguistics is not "language science," it's "proficiency in an actual language", and a school with a "language science" program instead of a linguistics program would teach introductory language science in a conlang?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics

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