There have been nodes on the subject of linguistics before, and we know that perl has some of its origins in natural language. What I have noted lately is the high level of linguistic interest and knowledge of the perlmonks. A couple of examples:

A remarkable number of monks speak multiple languages - on one occasion the denizens of the CB switched en masse into German purely as a prank aimed at a particular monk. Several monks for whom English is not their first language write it so well that it is well nigh impossible to tell, even in the fast environment of the CB.

CB'ers seem to love linguistic jokes, puns, humourous translations ('my hovercraft is full of eels') etc. and seem willing to kick varying translations of words, phrases, idioms etc around for hours to get the most accurate/funniest.

Monks seem to have an interest in linguistics generally. Cognitive neurolinguistics is my main academic interest, rozallin mentions an interest in computational linguistics in her off site blog, conversations relating to linguistics occur frequently in the CB and in PM nodes. (As I was writing this node, I glanced in the CB and noted Corion discussing sentence construction using Markov chains).

But many of the monks appear to be highly skilled career programmers, and programmers are stereotypically not noted for their language and communication skills.
So does perl & PM attract people with an interest in linguistics, or perhaps foster an interest in language? Any thoughts?

(Please also feel free to debate the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis and how it relates to perl; and don't be shy about using this opportunity to show off how many languages you speak!).

Update: Struck the sentence about programmers and language as irrelevant.

g0n, backpropagated monk

In reply to Perl, Perlmonks & Linguistics by g0n

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.