[SIGCIS-Members] Origin of 'language'?

Wed Nov 5 12:35:51 PST 2014

I could write a lot on the topic (and hopefully will some day), and have
written a bit already (in particular my essay "Death of a Discipline" in
the spring 2014 issue of *differences*, there regarding the Digital
Humanities) but basically it's contentious because it suggests that there
is some set of practices/systems called "languages" that includes "natural"
languages, programming languages, and/or formal languages, and that this
category called "language" is one about which generalizations can and
should be made. Outside of some very abstract ones, however, that just
isn't true, and those generalizations that are true tend to be
characteristics of formal or programming languages that were designed to be
like natural languages, and appear a fortiori in (some, or possibly all)
natural languages.

It is culturally contentious because it leads to the widespread and
mistaken view that "programming languages" and "natural languages" are the
same kinds of thing, which I believe is demonstrably and utterly wrong. One
piece of social evidence for its being incorrect (which I hope any
linguists on the list will feel free to weigh in on, but as I dabble in
linguistics a bit it is a generalization I am fairly certain about) is that
we have a field that studies what it generally calls "language," namely
linguistics, and that field requires its scholars to become experts in a
language, and that is always a human language. So specialists who use the
naked term "language" *always *mean what we mean by "natural language." So
far as I know, nobody has yet gotten a PhD in Linguistics where their
specialty was Ruby on Rails, and I hope it remains that way and believe it
will, though at this point one never knows. In part this is because
linguists have some nice criteria for what qualifies as a "language," and
programming & formal languages lack many of the most important
characteristics. That's why in scholarly lists of languages, only "natural"
languages appear (one of the most widely-cited and authoritative of these
lists is the *Ethnologue*: http://www.ethnologue.com/browse).

Yet we see everywhere a great deal of evidence that many, particularly
those strongly identified with computers, believe in the existence of this
super-category, often suggesting, for example, that students should learn
programming languages instead of or as a reasonable substitute for learning
natural languages. They are just different sorts of things entirely. The
argument whether students should learn to program is a separate argument
from whether they should learn foreign languages (at least in so far as any
such pedagogical questions can be separated). And note that there is a
political-cultural dimension here as well: it is always (at least in my
experience) computer advocates wanting to claim that programming languages
"are" languages, and never the other way around (ie, not linguists wanting
to claim that programming languages are the same kind of thing they study:
which is not to say they don't have linguistic features, as of course they
are designed to do, but that "hey, those programming languages are
languages too" is a claim that only emerges in one direction).

as long as I'm writing, I greatly appreciate Pierre's citation of the
recent D. Nofre, M. Priestley, & G. Alberts paper. I had not run across
that yet and, on quick glance, it looks like both an excellent analysis and
to be an invaluable source of information, and adds a great deal of context
to what I mentioned metonymically as the work of Grace Hopper and "others."

David

On Wed, Nov 5, 2014 at 2:14 PM, Fishwick, Paul <Paul.Fishwick at utdallas.edu>
wrote:

> David:
>   I’d like to better understand your argument here:
>
>  " almost immediately, people started construing these constructions as
> some
>   artificial meta-category called "language," despite this being an
> incredibly
>   contentious (and basically entirely inaccurate) way of construing things.
>   Chomsky's 1950s papers on context-free grammars did not help things.”
>
>  Why is this contentious in your opinion? Regarding language, The work of
> Pierce
> and de Saussure (semiology, semiotics) may also be relevant to the
> discussion on
> language.
> -paul
>
>
>
> Paul Fishwick, PhD
> Chair, ACM SIGSIM
> Distinguished University Chair of Arts & Technology
>    and Professor of Computer Science
> Director, Creative Automata Laboratory
> The University of Texas at Dallas
> Arts & Technology
> 800 West Campbell Road, AT10
> Richardson, TX 75080-3021
> Home: utdallas.edu/atec/fishwick<http://utdallas.edu/atec/fishwick>
> Blog: creative-automata.com<http://creative-automata.com>
>
> On Nov 5, 2014, at 10:59 AM, David Golumbia <dgolumbia at gmail.com<mailto:
> dgolumbia at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> t has two sources.
>
> first, the use of "formal language" in logic and philosophy of language in
> the work of Gottlob Frege in the late 19c/early 20c. Frege was clear that
> the "formal languages" he developed were not like human languages, but they
> have nevertheless sometimes been construed this way (although not usually
> by philosophers and logicians).
>
> second, from work in the late 1940s and early 1950s by Grace Hopper,
> others at the Navy, and some in academia (particularly Harvard and MIT) to
> make what were then called "computer codes" and basically required
> high-level knowledge of mathematics, easier to use, and also compilers to
> automatically turn these new forms (including well-known PLs like COBOL and
> FORTRAN) into machine code. They called these "programming languages" in
> part to distinguish them from "computer codes" and because they used
> elements of natural language in their construction. almost immediately,
> people started construing these constructions as some artificial
> meta-category called "language," despite this being an incredibly
> contentious (and basically entirely inaccurate) way of construing things.
> Chomsky's 1950s papers on context-free grammars did not help things.
>
> Have some work-in-progress on this topic as it's a particular pet peeve of
> mine, but at this point pretty far back on the backburner (if anyone wants
> to contribute please drop me a line, as I'm very interested in making it a
> group project).
>
> David
>
> 2014-11-05 4:13 GMT-05:00 Marie Gevers <marie.gevers at unamur.be<mailto:
> marie.gevers at unamur.be>>:
> I wonder by whom and when the word 'language' was used for the first time
> in the framework of computer sciences.
> Can anybody enlighten me?
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Marie
> --
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> David Golumbia
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David Golumbia
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