Which Language Uses the Most Sounds?

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/25/world/what-in-the-world/click-languages-taa-xoon-xoo-botswana.html

by jaoued • 10 years ago

110 41 10 years ago

blue1• 10 years ago

I am thinking that Perl is (probably) the computer language which uses the most operators, but not everyone believes this is a good thing.

I mean, it seems there is somewhere a sweet spot between lack of expressiveness and overcomplication.

bunchofdweebs• 10 years ago

Not everything has to be about programming.

DasIch• 10 years ago

Perl might have a lot of operators but Haskell's ability to define your own operators leads to a ton of operators in the standard library and third party packages.

zzleeper2• 10 years ago

That's one of the things keeping me away from Haskell. It seems that to be proficient I would need to know way more beyond the "standard library", but go into the String vs Text debates, and the huge amounts of common knowledge out there.

GlitchMr• 10 years ago

So does Perl 6 (it may be because initial Perl 6 implementation was made in Haskell).

ugexe• 10 years ago

Like Perl 6?

labster• 10 years ago

Perl 6 has a similar ability to define custom operators. In addition to the rich selection of normal operators, there are the meta operators like summation [+] and the bat operator ^..^ and a full range of set operators like ∈.

JoshTriplett• 10 years ago

No, that crown would almost certainly go to one of the variants of APL, which have more operators than ASCII has symbols. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)

Cyph0n4• 10 years ago

I've always thought that if you learn one programming language, you can probably pick up any other language quite easily, except for APL/J/K.

throwaway7645• 10 years ago

Perl6 can be written as beautifully as any language, but can also be written to look similar to APL (more so than P5), but obviously not as terse as APL.

zzleeper2• 10 years ago

Interestingly, the same might be true with languages.

Quechua (from the Andean Mountains) only has three vowels (a, i, u). I can't find a reference, but AFAIK the main hypothesis was that a 3-vowel system made it easier to communicate across longer distances (i.e. across a canyon or valley in the Andes).

zzzcpan• 10 years ago

which uses the most operators, but not everyone believes this is a good thing

You cannot really have too much builtin operators, they are basically functions that don't depend on context (i.e. on type of the object). The only side effect is that some of them are not going to be used often and you'll need a quick way to look them up to be able to understand the code in those cases.

However, having too few of them is a problem that leads to contextual dual meaning operators (like '+' in many languages), related cognitive overhead and bugs.

vorg• 10 years ago

Programming language operators seem more analogous to words like prepositions and pronouns in natural languages than to sounds. I think the analogous concept to a NL sound in a PL is a token (ASCII or Unicode).

Cyph0n4• 10 years ago

Coincidentally, I just now posted the below to my Facebook.

Taa (or !Xoo) is one of the most phonetically complex languages in the world[0]. Here is a video[1] of a !Xoo speaker reading a paragraph of text in English, and then reading the translation of that same text in !Xoo. The number and variety of phonetic clicks is simply amazing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taa_language

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zrek3r29HvE

cocktailpeanuts• 10 years ago

Wow this is almost Beatboxing. Someone should create a music out of this.

jfaucett• 10 years ago

A long time ago I was interested in finding out what the intersection of all languages sounds would be, would it be an empty set or was there enough overlap that someone designing the next esperanto could build it using universal sounds thus allowing any human speaker to pronunciate it without difficulty. Turns out there is a good degree of overlap if you allow for a very small bit of fuzzyness. For instance, 'a','m', and 'p' are some of the most common sounds across all languages, which is also interesting when you realize "mama" and "papa" - with slight variations - display high universality in their pronunciation across all languages.

for more info see: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-common-phonemes-amon...

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

jcranmer• 10 years ago

I think if you take the complete intersection, the set is empty. However, the five standard vowels /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/ are fairly common (although many Native American languages have four vowels). For consonants, /p/, /t/, /k/, /m/, /n/, /s/, and /l/ are probably the most common.

Esperanto's phonotactics is basically Zamenhof's Slavic dialect (Polish and Belorussian). However, Lojban tries for a more neutral disposition, even to the point of permitting epenthetic vowels in complex consonant clusters (stressing that they need to be distinguishable from the 6 regular vowels--the 5 vowels above plus /ə/).

It should be noted that when languages have restrictive phonemic inventories, the challenge is not so much in producing the other sounds as it is in recognizing them as distinct sounds.

hasenj• 10 years ago

Many Middle Eastern languages/dialects don't have the 'p' sound. For example, a native Egyptian with no training in English pronunciation would pronounce 'people' as 'biibul'.

arundelo• 10 years ago

If you're not already familiar with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona , check it out. "Both its sound inventory and phonotactics (patterns of possible sound combinations) are found in the majority of human languages and are therefore readily accessible."

johansch2• 10 years ago

Every time I hear Thai language spoken I'm reminded that this tonal language inspired the creators of "Mars attacks" to what the fictional language used by the aliens should sound like, just because it sounded so alien.

I have to say though that the Thai language can be spoken relatively calmly and soothingly, but when spoken by in anger or in a particular kind of formality, it sounds quite similar to the language used in the movie. Doesn't matter if it's a male or female speaker, to a westerner it sounds like.. well, the crazy martians from Mars Attacks.

This is actually mentioned in the extras bits on the original Mars Attacks DVD from like 1998 or 1999 or so. They did use Thai language as the main inspiration for the language of the martians.

jpatokal• 10 years ago

Since English is (largely) not tonal, you're not used to the rapid pitch changes required by tonal languages, hence the "alien" feel. For what it's worth, I find Thai quite euphoneous compared to Vietnamese or Cantonese, both of which have even more tones.

Question for HN: if your first language is tonal, what do non-tonal languages sound like to you? I've frequently heard Finnish described as boring/mumbling, because it's both non-tonal and has a very predictable stress pattern (emphasis always on the first syllable).

johansch2• 10 years ago

My native language is Swedish, not English. They are both quite closely related though.

I'm really curious to that Swedish sounds like to tonal-language people. It's often described as "sing-songy" by "non-tonal" people from e.g. UK/US.

UhUhUhUh• 10 years ago

On a side note (!), I stumbled across that: http://qz.com/488701/humans-are-confusing-music-composed-by-... Which in turn made me wonder if we couldn't create a program that would translate code into music...

Nzen• 10 years ago

A spectrum of increasing respect for those ellipses:

https://github.com/debugger22/github-audio

https://github.com/Thomasb81/Midi_SynthFpga

http://overtone.github.io/

https://github.com/maximecb/Turing-Tunes

tgb• 10 years ago

So would Taa be helpful or not for noisy restaurants? It's hard to whisper, but the click sounds are also very distinctive so maybe you would need to be loud. Though can you even shout a click?

punnerud• 10 years ago

If you can't read: https://www.google.no/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd... (skip subscription by going through Google)

MichaelMoser123• 10 years ago

Interesting if children have any problem with acquiring these sounds. Russian speaking kids frequently have problems with the rolling r. I wonder if click languages are hard to learn - as a first language.

voycey• 10 years ago

In programming languages I would say Perl, I have never heard some of the noises I have heard coming out of programmers trying to decipher and debug someone elses Perl program ;)

Which Language Uses the Most Sounds?

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