>PS - my personal take: English is eventually going to be transcended by
some
>evolved version of ebonics, because it offers the hope of moving English in
a
>more expressive direction, but our penetration of global culture (i.e. the
>epidemiology of our cultural memes conveyed by English as an infection
vector) is
>going to increase before it decreases. If that doesn't push the French or
the
>Chinese (the two fussiest language-bigot cultures on the planet) over the
edge,
>nothing will... ;-)
if you have any professed love of language, you should study chinese a
little.
chinese has many modern programming technologies built-in:
1) it's object oriented, every chinese character is complete and has a life
of its own
2) it has no grammar or word ordering, the way you use it determine the
semantic. the same character can be a noun, verb, object, subject etc
depending how you use it.
3) in actual usage, it is fully of patterns, best practices and idioms.
4) it's expressive and powerful, it's just as easy to write beautiful poetry
as lousy
limericks.
5) it's backward and upward compatible. you can read text from 3000 years
ago as well as anything thay may be written 1000 years from now.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun May 06 2001 - 08:04:36 PDT