this post was submitted on 09 May 2026
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No Stupid Questions

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In many programming languages, phrases are shortened to reduce the time taken to write programs. "var" instead of "variable", "int" instead of integer, etc. This makes writing code much faster, but what if this was applied to the whole of the English language?

If programmers were to have the power to change how words are spelt and pronounced, what would change? Is every word shortened to three or four letters? Would leet speak become dominant? How practical would it be, how much more productive would the (English speaking) population be?

As for other languages, I'm not sure how well it would work. A majority of programming languages are based on English, and many other languages have restrictions that make it more difficult to change the spellings like this (e.g. gendered words, alphabet-less character sets). English, on the other hand, is infamous for having more exceptions than there are rules.

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[–] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 38 points 5 days ago (3 children)

There already are plenty of conlangs (constructed languages). The main thing that differentiates them from natural languages is the fact that their grammar generally doesn't have any exceptions (irregular verbs or nouns). It would be possible to create such a language based on the grammar and vocabulary of English.

The only conlang I'm proficient in is Esperanto, which definitely works very well for practical communication. One cool feature about Esperanto is the system of prefixes and suffixes that acts as a vocabulary shortcut, for example the word for "cold" is just "un-warm" (varma / malvarma), or the word for "school" is just "learning-place" (lerni / lernejo). The language you're imagining would likely also consist of words like "unwarm" and "learnery".

Meanwhile I don't think the length of (root) words needs to be especially short. Studies have found that all languages transmit information at approximately the same rate, which is why Spanish with its relatively long words seems to be spoken so fast. Human brain capacity is a limiting factor for things like that.

[–] henfredemars@lemdro.id 10 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I came here looking for Esperanto and was not disappointed.

[–] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 16 points 5 days ago

I ~~use Arch~~ speak Esperanto btw

[–] Godort@lemmy.ca 7 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Studies have found that all languages transmit information at approximately the same rate

Is this only true in speech? Japanese as an example is much more dense in text than English and can convey more information in fewer written characters.

But, those characters take longer to write and often have multisyllabic pronunciation, so speech would be unaffected.

[–] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 5 days ago

Yes, of course I'm talking about spoken language. Of course if English were written in kanji we would need fewer characters to express the same information, but it wouldn't change the spoken language at all.

(I remember learning the following graphical user interface design rule: switch your application to Spanish or Portuguese to check whether UI messages still fit in the boxes you've put them in. Spanish and Portuguese are the common languages that need the most characters per unit of information.)

[–] speculate7383@lemmy.today 1 points 5 days ago

This recently came up for LLM coding tools:

https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman

[–] Yaky@slrpnk.net 2 points 5 days ago

Toki Pona specifically makes me think of overly verbose programming languages. With limited ~120 word vocabulary, describing things can be lengthy. Orange pet cat would be something like "good animal of house and of red yellow".