{"id":1269,"date":"2013-02-17T21:38:00","date_gmt":"2013-02-17T20:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/?p=1269"},"modified":"2024-10-14T13:40:00","modified_gmt":"2024-10-14T11:40:00","slug":"the-optimal-number-of-languages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/2013\/02\/17\/the-optimal-number-of-languages\/","title":{"rendered":"The Optimal Number of Languages"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">There are more than <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ethnologue.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" class=\"broken_link\">6000 languages in the world<\/a>,&nbsp;though most distributions about languages are power laws: for example, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Zipf%27s_law\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">word occurrence<\/a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/email.eva.mpg.de\/~wichmann\/PowerLawsWichmann.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" class=\"broken_link\">language family size<\/a>&nbsp;and language usage. In effect, only less than 100 living languages are used for written, and many of them do not even have a written form: many wrongly claim that languages are endangered, ignoring that <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/pdf\/physics\/0703144\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">their number is a function of population<\/a>,&nbsp;and with a growing human population, their number will only&nbsp;grow.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">The parallels between natural and computer languages are striking, even though their origins and purposes are so different.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">In computer science, there are more than 4000 computer languages, and growing (note that there are only one million people who know how to program): the easiness by how parsers and DSLs can be created can only contribute to this growing trend. And the distribution of their use reveal <a href=\"http:\/\/adambard.com\/blog\/top-github-languages-for-2013-so-far\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a similar power law<\/a>: the truth being that only a small subset of languages is being used in production systems, the rest being academic exercises. Note that their ranking is very volatile (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.tiobe.com\/index.php\/content\/paperinfo\/tpci\/index.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span class=\"caps\">TIOBE<\/span> index<\/a>) compared to natural languages, with <a href=\"http:\/\/datahackermd.com\/2013\/language-use-on-github\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" class=\"broken_link\">largely isolated and fragmented communities<\/a>&nbsp;matching the effect that territories have on natural languages.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Although some subtle differences between natural and computer languages may explain their large number in proportion to their smaller supporting population: computer languages may maintain their usefulness beyond the hardware that supported them stops working, a common occurrence within the world of&nbsp;<span class=\"caps\">COBOL<\/span>.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">[amazon_link id=\u201c0691136890\u201d target=\u201c_blank\u201d ]How many natural languages do we need?[\/amazon_link]&nbsp;Six, if you were to ask <a href=\"http:\/\/ideas.repec.org\/p\/cpr\/ceprdp\/6367.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Victor Ginsburgh and Shlomo Weber<\/a>.&nbsp;And that is also a pretty reasonable number for computer languages: after examining their calculation and analysis, I can only conclude that learning a number larger than this is a clear sign of being over-educated (I\u2019m guilty as charged).<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are more than 6000 languages in the world,&nbsp;though most distributions about languages are power laws: for example, word occurrence,&nbsp;language family size&nbsp;and language usage. In effect, only less than 100 living languages are used for written, and many of them do not even have a written form: many wrongly claim that languages are endangered, ignoring&nbsp;[\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wp_typography_post_enhancements_disabled":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1269"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1269"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1555,"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1269\/revisions\/1555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}