You’re uttering lots of anglocentric criticisms as if they were true only of English. Try to parse Japanese someday.

The fact is that all natural languages disambiguate extremely heavily on context. When I say “Albert was not happy about the Bomb,” you know exactly which Albert and which bomb I mean. This sentence would be nearly the same in every single language; there is almost no language in which this sentence would be inexpressible without the inclusion of more context, and yet it will be equally comprehensible in all of them.

Every single claim you make applies in one form or other to every single natural language. Some throw up hurdles you possibly haven’t even imagined because they work completely differently from English.

I don’t know if that’s a problem. Despite the fact that I might not understand someone from Jamaica, I can certainly talk to roughly a few hundred million people without any significant difficulty in communication. If that counts as failure for a language, I want to know what success is.

The contrast is a language like Esperanto, which is constructed, is extremely regular, has very few rules, can be picked up in about 2 hours other than memorising vocabulary – and has no speakers.

Makeshifts last the longest.

In reply to Re^3: Perl for big projects by Aristotle
in thread Perl for big projects by CountZero

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