Re: What languages do you regularly use besides forth?

Alex McDonald wrote:

But I still don't see how "thinking in English" destroys judgement.

It has caused you to make false claims of a special status for English among languages. Similarly, an overspecialization in Forth causes some Forthers to grossly underestimate the capabilities of other programming techniques.

It
seems to me to be a rather sweeping statement; any monoglot could be
accused of the same. Do Klingons only make war because theirs is a
war-like language?

The Japanese language is loaded with special vocabulary and verb conjugations for expressing feudal social relationships. Japanese social organization remains relatively feudal. I think this consonance is no accident. Causation no doubt runs both ways: language and social organization reinforce each other.

Read Feynman's essay on learning Japanese some time.

Another thing about languages that use Chinese characters is that they
have a visual dimension that has no counterpart in English. When I first
encountered the Japanese jargon for "operand fetch" (読み込み), the
visual deconstruction (especially of the character "込") into "radicals"
provided enough of a clue that I understood it, even though it wasn't in
my dictionary. Also, consider that "協" (cooperation) has *three* copies
of the radical for "power" in it: social propaganda?


Ah, but we have fonts; thousands of them. Even the worst advertising
copy looks great in Garamond Italic; the best poetry is positively
unreadable in all caps Arial Black.

Japanese has fonts. Some of the more flamboyant ones can be rather difficult for a poor gaijin to penetrate :-(.

Furthermore, Japanese has additional expressive freedom that English lacks. You can write it using Chinese characters. It can write it using either of two different phonetic syllabaries. You can write it in Roman letters using either of two official transliteration schemes (and transliterations that fit neither are also common). Not all words can be written in all writing systems, but most "root words" can. Roman letters work for everything, so you can have all your favorite European fonts in addition to Japanese fonts.

For handwriting, one block style and two cursive styles are commonly recognized, and of course there is much individual variation.

You can arrange Japanese text Chinese style, top to bottom and right to left, or European style, left to right and top to bottom. You can order pages in a book Chinese style (right to left), or European style (left to right).

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John Doty, Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
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His diagnosis of the hostility ... reflects the willful blindness of the invader who assures himself that the natives are only made unfriendly by some other provocation than his own. -Barbara W. Tuchman
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