Coincidentally, I just now posted the below to my Facebook.

> Taa (or !Xoo) is one of the most phonetically complex languages in the world[0]. Here is a video[1] of a !Xoo speaker reading a paragraph of text in English, and then reading the translation of that same text in !Xoo. The number and variety of phonetic clicks is simply amazing.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taa_language

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zrek3r29HvE

Wow this is almost Beatboxing. Someone should create a music out of this.

A long time ago I was interested in finding out what the intersection of all languages sounds would be, would it be an empty set or was there enough overlap that someone designing the next esperanto could build it using universal sounds thus allowing any human speaker to pronunciate it without difficulty. Turns out there is a good degree of overlap if you allow for a very small bit of fuzzyness. For instance, 'a','m', and 'p' are some of the most common sounds across all languages, which is also interesting when you realize "mama" and "papa" - with slight variations - display high universality in their pronunciation across all languages.

for more info see: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-common-phonemes-amon...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_and_papa

I think if you take the complete intersection, the set is empty. However, the five standard vowels /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/ are fairly common (although many Native American languages have four vowels). For consonants, /p/, /t/, /k/, /m/, /n/, /s/, and /l/ are probably the most common.

Esperanto's phonotactics is basically Zamenhof's Slavic dialect (Polish and Belorussian). However, Lojban tries for a more neutral disposition, even to the point of permitting epenthetic vowels in complex consonant clusters (stressing that they need to be distinguishable from the 6 regular vowels--the 5 vowels above plus /ə/).

It should be noted that when languages have restrictive phonemic inventories, the challenge is not so much in producing the other sounds as it is in recognizing them as distinct sounds.

If you're not already familiar with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona , check it out. "Both its sound inventory and phonotactics (patterns of possible sound combinations) are found in the majority of human languages and are therefore readily accessible."

Many Middle Eastern languages/dialects don't have the 'p' sound. For example, a native Egyptian with no training in English pronunciation would pronounce 'people' as 'biibul'.

Every time I hear Thai language spoken I'm reminded that this tonal language inspired the creators of "Mars attacks" to what the fictional language used by the aliens should sound like, just because it sounded so alien.

I have to say though that the Thai language can be spoken relatively calmly and soothingly, but when spoken by in anger or in a particular kind of formality, it sounds quite similar to the language used in the movie. Doesn't matter if it's a male or female speaker, to a westerner it sounds like.. well, the crazy martians from Mars Attacks.

This is actually mentioned in the extras bits on the original Mars Attacks DVD from like 1998 or 1999 or so. They did use Thai language as the main inspiration for the language of the martians.

Since English is (largely) not tonal, you're not used to the rapid pitch changes required by tonal languages, hence the "alien" feel. For what it's worth, I find Thai quite euphoneous compared to Vietnamese or Cantonese, both of which have even more tones.

Question for HN: if your first language is tonal, what do non-tonal languages sound like to you? I've frequently heard Finnish described as boring/mumbling, because it's both non-tonal and has a very predictable stress pattern (emphasis always on the first syllable).

My native language is Swedish, not English. They are both quite closely related though.

I'm really curious to that Swedish sounds like to tonal-language people. It's often described as "sing-songy" by "non-tonal" people from e.g. UK/US.

It's because of words like anden and andEN. That second version is sing-songy because it has two stresses.

On a side note (!), I stumbled across that: http://qz.com/488701/humans-are-confusing-music-composed-by-... Which in turn made me wonder if we couldn't create a program that would translate code into music...

A spectrum of increasing respect for those ellipses:

https://github.com/debugger22/github-audio

https://github.com/Thomasb81/Midi_SynthFpga

http://overtone.github.io/

https://github.com/maximecb/Turing-Tunes

I am thinking that Perl is (probably) the computer language which uses the most operators, but not everyone believes this is a good thing.

I mean, it seems there is somewhere a sweet spot between lack of expressiveness and overcomplication.

No, that crown would almost certainly go to one of the variants of APL, which have more operators than ASCII has symbols. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)

I've always thought that if you learn one programming language, you can probably pick up any other language quite easily, except for APL/J/K.

Many claim that Haskell is easiest to learn as a first language.

I don't know Haskell, but from what I've seen, it doesn't look like a beginner-friendly language. I think Python is the undisputed king of introductory languages.

It means that the easiest time to learn Haskell is as a first language, not that it's the easiest of all first languages!

Ohh I see. That makes sense!

The strange syntax of Haskell is what's turning me off from learning it. With Lisp, the syntax was strange still, sure, but it wasn't confusing, it made sense. I feel like I can't even get in to reading Haskell or even OCaml.

However if Haskell had macros (like Perl 6's or even Lisp's), I'd jump ship from Lisp quite quickly. It's a mature language with the libraries I want.

> if Haskell had macros

What are you wanting that's missing from Template Haskell?

Or even lazy evaluation.

I think implementing lazy evaluation is a common use case of macros in languages that don't support it otherwise, but there are plenty of other uses (some questionable on balance, but all with their upsides).

Perl6 can be written as beautifully as any language, but can also be written to look similar to APL (more so than P5), but obviously not as terse as APL.

Interestingly, the same might be true with languages.

Quechua (from the Andean Mountains) only has three vowels (a, i, u). I can't find a reference, but AFAIK the main hypothesis was that a 3-vowel system made it easier to communicate across longer distances (i.e. across a canyon or valley in the Andes).

Perl might have a lot of operators but Haskell's ability to define your own operators leads to a ton of operators in the standard library and third party packages.

That's one of the things keeping me away from Haskell. It seems that to be proficient I would need to know way more beyond the "standard library", but go into the String vs Text debates, and the huge amounts of common knowledge out there.

String is a type alias for a lazy linked list of characters: not very high performance, but easy to work with using all the basic list manipulation tools.

Text is a compact and efficient representation, more similar to strings in other languages.

As far as learning libraries: its not mandatory and you can code as well as anywhere else without them, but the "language enhancing libraries" are undeniably useful, and can do some incredibly useful things. Monad transformers let you merge computational contexts, Conduit lets you cleanly define stream transformations, Lens lets you manipulate specific aspects of some state in a context, etc.

Except for Lens, most packages shy away from operator soup. The basic set you need to know to read most Haskell code is quite small, and tied to the core concepts you need to know anyway, such as:

    Functor (<$>)
    Applicative (<*>, <*, *>)
    Monad (>>=, =<<, >=>, <=<)
    Monoid (<>)
    Alternative (<|>)

Also ++, $, ., and some others. But yeah, you don't need to know too many to be able to read 90% of Haskell code.

I feel your pain. Haskell makes it possible to write very powerful libraries which change how you think about your program, like MTL or conduits, and has APIs like Data.Text which change how you think about string processing. However, the language and community is quite mature.

Most of the debates either have answers (use Text instead of String, most of the time) or don't matter to most people (MTL vs transformers or monadLib). In my mind, it's no worse than trying to pick a JavaScript framework. If you're interested, give it a shot some day.

Perl 6 has a similar ability to define custom operators. In addition to the rich selection of normal operators, there are the meta operators like summation [+] and the bat operator ^..^ and a full range of set operators like ∈.

Like Perl 6?

Programming language operators seem more analogous to words like prepositions and pronouns in natural languages than to sounds. I think the analogous concept to a NL sound in a PL is a token (ASCII or Unicode).

Not everything has to be about programming.

If you can't read: https://www.google.no/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd... (skip subscription by going through Google)

So would Taa be helpful or not for noisy restaurants? It's hard to whisper, but the click sounds are also very distinctive so maybe you would need to be loud. Though can you even shout a click?

Interesting if children have any problem with acquiring these sounds. Russian speaking kids frequently have problems with the rolling r. I wonder if click languages are hard to learn - as a first language.

In programming languages I would say Perl, I have never heard some of the noises I have heard coming out of programmers trying to decipher and debug someone elses Perl program ;)