Hallo conlangers!

On Sunday 25 September 2011 16:10:42, R A Brown wrote:

> On 24/09/2011 18:19, And Rosta wrote:
> > R A Brown, On 24/09/2011 08:33:
> [snip]
> 
> >> ....... It was not Jeffrey Henning's intention that
> >> Fith be human-usable and AFAIK it is _generally_
> >> accepted that full blown Fith is not. I really need to
> >> 
> >>  see firm evidence to the contrary and, so far, I have
> >>  not seen it.
> > 
> > It can also be demonstrated that full-blown English is
> > not human-usable either.
> 
> How? What on earth is "full blown English"???

A theoretical concept dreamt up by And Rosta, and utterly
irrelevant to the linguistic analysis of English, or to
linguistics in general ;)

>  From the context it should have been obvious that by "full
> blown Fith" I meant Fith as designed by Jeffrey Henning as
> opposed to 'Shallow Fith.'

Right.  "Full-blown Fith" is Fith proper, with all its stack
operators and unlimited stack depth, as opposed to Shallow
Fith.  There is nothing that is to "ordinary" English what
Fith proper is to Shallow Fith, so the term "Full-blown
English" as used by And Rosta is meaningless.  English is
not a stripped-down, depth-limited derivative of anything
else, so there is no point in naming that "anything else"
"Full-blown English" or whatever.

>       The latter, as it's author
> states, "is a proper subset of Fith, with strict limits to
> stack depth and with most of the stack operators removed";
> its "sentences could be parsed as
> SOV/postposition/noun-adjective sentences by humans and as
> very simple LIFO sentences by Fithians."

Just that.
 
> By "full blown Fith" I mean, of course, Fith without stack
> depth limitation and with all the stack operators defined by
> its author.

Certainly.
 
> To me English, synchronically, are all the manifestations,
> whether spoken or written, of those who currently speak
> English as their L1 or, if fluent, as their L2 or L3
> (trilingualism being relatively common outside of the
> monoglot anglophone world).  To talk of some prescriptive
> "full blown" English makes no sense to me.

Especially when it comes to an artificial abstraction from
prescriptive grammars of English ...

> ========================================================
> 
> On 25/09/2011 11:46, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> > Hallo conlangers!
> 
> > On Saturday 24 September 2011 21:59:31, R A Brown wrote:
> [snip]
> 
> >> But I do have some experience with natural language
> >> processing by computer and, unless things have
> >> radically changed since I retired, the poor Von
> >> Neumann machines do not find natlangs particularly
> >> easy!
> > 
> > Indeed not!  This of course also means that a Fithian
> > would perhaps have as much difficulty with English (or
> > any other human language) as a human being with Fith.
> 
> That seems a likely scenario to me.

Yes.  Stack-based languages can be parsed very efficiently
by fairly simple software, which is the precise reason why
Forth, PostScript, HP pocket calculators and several other
applications use a stack-based syntax - it makes their
implementation easier and more efficient.  Parsing human
languages with computers is much harder.  We can only
speculate what kind of neural circuitry Fithians use to
comprehend their language, but it may be much simpler than
ours.  At any rate, it is *different*, and thus human
languages should be as difficult to them as stack-based
languages are to us.

> > Given the fact that the stack is the simplest of all
> > compound data structures,  which is the exact reason why
> > 
> >  programming language such as Forth use it,
> 
> ...it was, of course, the programming language Forth, that
> inspired Jeffrey to construct Fith     ;)

Yep.
 
> > the Fithian language facility may be of a very simple yet
> > effective kind - effective for parsing stack-based
> > languages, but failing at human languages.
> 
> This may very well be true.
> 
> > And's argument about Fithians being better at parsing
> > English than native speakers of English thus fails.  But
> > alas, we don't have any Fithians at our disposal to test
> > these hypotheses.
> 
> Alas not - which IMO makes all the arguments about whether
> Fithians would be better or worse at parsing English than L1
> anglophones a bit pointless.

Indeed.  One could theorize without end about what a Fithian
could do or not do, but, alas, Fithians do not exist in the
real world, thus there is no way testing such ideas.  It is
like debating how many angels could dance on the tip of a pin.
 
> [snip]
> 
> >> You are quite right - the way to test it is for two (or
> >> more) people to learn it and try to use properly (*not*
> >> in the Shallow Fith version) it as a spoken language.
> >> (Written would be no good as it would give time for one
> >> to work through the stacks and puzzle the thing out).
> > 
> > Right.  And I guess that they will fail, and end up
> > actually speaking something like Shallow Fith, avoiding
> > those parts of the language that are difficult or
> > impossible to handle; but before we can be sure about
> > that, that experiment needs first to be carried out in
> > practice.
> 
> Yep - no one in this thread, as far as I see, has denied the
> possibility of some sort of human-usable stack-based
> language.  After all, Forth programmers and even LISP
> programmers are human   ;)

Sure.  But programming does not require real-time
conversationality.
 
> Your own 'Shallow Fith' is expressly designed to be
> human-usable.

It is meant to be, and I hope I have succeeded.
 
> The argument is about Fith itself with no restriction on
> stack depth and a whole load stack operators; see
> http://www.langmaker.com/stackconj.htm
> 
> Until/ Unless we get people actually using Fith as a spoken
> means of communication, we cannot tell how well humans would
> cope with the language designed for a race of alien
> marsupials     ;)

Yep.

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