Quite some time ago, I read an article about some researcher in IIT Delhi who was trying to use Sanskrit as a base for a programming language , because it was more suited for that purpose than English. Before I go any further, I want to make it clear that I am no language fanatic; but I do find many thing in many languages funny ( not amusing .. just funny ;) ) . English, ofcourse has it's own set of illogical things.
Take for example numbers in Hindi. I've studied Hindi in School & can speak / read/ write fairly fluently; but when it comes to numbers I'm completely blank! Why ... because there is absolutely no way of deducing what a number would be called based on it's basic blocks ( or atleast I don't know how to do it) . Most ppl just know what is say 29 or 78 in hindi ( because they have been saying these numbers for years .. it's more like ok .. 29 is .. this ). The only number I memorized ( yes..memorized ! ) was my house number ( i think it was "teen saw bathiis" ) so that i can reach home without a problem ( this was when i was in Gurgaon ).
Yesterday, I was looking for something on wiki while I stumbled upon this thing about numbers in languages.. check it out
"though most spoken languages express most numbers, especially those larger than a hundred, in a "big-endian manner"[5] (in modern English, for example, one says "twenty-four", not "four-and-twenty") there are notable exceptions such as the German, Danish, and the Dutch languages, which use "little-endian" for numbers up to 99 and "mixed endianness" for larger numbers (e.g. vierundzwanzig/vierentwintig (24, literally "four-and-twenty"), and hundertvierundzwanzig (124, literally "hundred four-and-twenty"). Sanskrit language is a larger exception which uses "little-endian" for small (e.g. chaturvinsh (24, literally "four-and-twenty")) as well as large numbers (e.g. chaturvinshatyadhikashatatam (124, literally "four-and-twenty-over-hundred"))."
( Source :wiki) ( otherwise they'll kill me for plagiarism ;) )
Have a look at the last part, where it talks about Sanskrit , and how the numbers are perfectly logically represented in it . I guess this would make Sanskrit to be a suitable base language for programming, but it would take eons of years for it to take off ! It's pretty amazing to see that our ancestors thought through the process of numbers so logically while we kill it in certain languages like Hindi !( No offense .. I just hate to memorize things that u don't actually have to memorize .. )
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2 comments:
for once my post is long ... it would be difficult to post a comment longer the post this time around ;)
endian thing went right over my head, on a height taller than the mt everest.
and no offence meant but 'chaturvinshatyadhikashatatam' seems like one of those rituals our grandparents performed
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