Intro

Note: this post is mostly about human language not computer languages. I will mention some computer stuff as it's a personal interest.

Yesterday I took a trip to Quebec City. I really enjoy the language and culture in Quebec City, it has such an old Europe feel and is primarily French (unlike Montreal which seems half French half English).

This got me thinking about my interest in both French and languages in general.

3 Similarities human and computer languages

Here are 3 principles which I think are true in both human and computer languages:

- Language are related to each other to different degrees
- Language influences thinking
- Languages change and evolve in both rules and use

I will only go into the first point here on this post, but watch out for posts with "Language Blog" in the title for the other points later.

Language Relatedness

Often people think of each language as existing in a bubble. When they see that someone can speak X number of languages they become very impressed. If we look at history especially in the Catholic church you will find speaking many languages wasn't that uncommon.

The key to priests and Catholic scholars speaking many languages was in the understanding of language family trees. Languages branch out from common origins. Take for example the Romance Language group.

Catholic scholars had a strong background in Latin and most often had a native language in the Romance Language group. They could then leverage this knowledge to grow their knowledge of language as a single branching unit.

For example here is a little trick English speakers can use when learning French. There are over 1000 nouns which end with -tion in English that also exist in French. The meaning isn't always the same but most often it is, or at least related. Apparently this same principle can be extended to all languages in the Romance Language family tree.

Source

English is an interesting case because it is a Germanic language which has been injected with an enormous amount French words. This can be seen in a huge overlap of words.

See Wikipedia for larger list of words.

Here is an interesting short video that looks at some French words absorbed by English. The clip is actually from a longer (and very interesting) documentary on the history of the English Language.

With programming languages I believe this is also the same. When you move between programming languages you may see concepts and patterns you are very familiar with.

If you're feeling comfortable with both English and French and find these principles interesting I would recommend the book EuroComRom - The Seven Sieves: How to Read All the Romance Languages Right Away.

PDF version available at time of writing here

This book has some very interesting tricks that can be used specifically in the area of reading. These tricks are split into 7 sieves. That is 7 layers of decoding text when you don't know the full language.

For example identifying globally recognized words, recognizing words common to another language, sounding out the word to find similarities, and much more.

I find it interesting to skim over articles on steem written by Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese to see if I can understand anything. With steem you often get pictures along with the text, I think even if I don't understand anything the process is fun.

About a year ago I was looking through this book. I made a mini-site which is still not finished. It contains some more information on this topic. Also I have started converting some of the word lists to JSON which is a standard data format that makes making things like games using the words easier.

Here is an example learning game I made. You select the word list you want to study and then choose which two languages you want to compare for the quiz.

If I find more time I'd love to go back and finish the data entry for all the word lists.