As someone who speaks Hungarian, but never seen Hungarian notation outside the context of programming, I'm suddenly realizing that Hungarian notation is probably named after how the Hungarian language itself works.
Words in Hungarian have specific endings that change their "grammatical type" (I forget the grammatical term for that... part of speech?)
Some examples:
1. "-ás/-és": Transforms a verb into a noun that denotes an action or a profession. For example, the verb "tanul" (to study) becomes "tanulás" (study or studying).
2. "-ó/-ő": Converts a verb into a noun that refers to a person who does the action. For example, "tanít" (to teach) becomes "tanító" (teacher).
3. "-hat/-het": Added to a verb to form a new verb indicating possibility or permission. For example, "olvas" (reads) turns into "olvas-hat" (may/can read).
4. "-tlan/-tlen": When attached to a noun, it creates an adjective expressing the lack of something. For example, "szín" (color) becomes "színtelen" (colorless).
5. "-i": Added to a noun to create an adjective indicating origin or belonging. For example, "Amerika" (America) becomes "amerikai" (American).
6. "-ol": Attached to nouns to form verbs. This is often used with foreign words in Hungarian, like "ghosting-ol", "bullying-ol", "coworking-ol".
Additionally, in Hungarian these suffixes can be combined, so if you want to use the English noun "ghosting" as a noun in Hungarian, you still actually have to add the suffixes, so you would say "ghosting-ol-ás".
> The original Hungarian notation was invented by Charles Simonyi, a programmer who worked at Xerox PARC circa 1972–1981, and who later became Chief Architect at Microsoft. The name of the notation is a reference to Simonyi's nation of origin, and also, according to Andy Hertzfeld, because it made programs "look like they were written in some inscrutable foreign language". Hungarian people's names are "reversed" compared to most other European names; the family name precedes the given name. For example, the anglicized name "Charles Simonyi" in Hungarian was originally "Simonyi Károly". In the same way, the type name precedes the "given name" in Hungarian notation. The similar Smalltalk "type last" naming style (e.g. aPoint and lastPoint) was common at Xerox PARC during Simonyi's tenure there.
> Simonyi's paper on the notation referred to prefixes used to indicate the "type" of information being stored. His proposal was largely concerned with decorating identifier names based upon the semantic information of what they store (in other words, the variable's purpose). Simonyi's notation came to be called Apps Hungarian, since the convention was used in the applications division of Microsoft. Systems Hungarian developed later in the Microsoft Windows development team. Apps Hungarian is not entirely distinct from what became known as Systems Hungarian, as some of Simonyi's suggested prefixes contain little or no semantic information (see below for examples).
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Simonyi's native language may have had some impact on how he wrote code, but it was not "human language -> write code like Hungarian -> Hungarian notation".
> The resulting code was dense and hard to read. Simonyi’s system came to be known as Hungarian notation, both in homage to its creator’s birthplace and because it made programs “look like they were written in some inscrutable foreign language,” according to programming pioneer Andy Hertzfeld. Hungarian is widely cursed by its detractors. Canadian Java expert Roedy Green has jokingly called it “the tactical nuclear weapon of source code obfuscation techniques.” Mozilla programmer Alec Flett wrote this parody:
prepBut nI vrbLike adjHungarian! qWhat’s artThe adjBig nProblem?
On my yet to be assembled shelf of random things will be a bunch of books that intend to make one go o_O when they read titles in the background of video call.
What problems? Why most? And why "our"? I find it silly to think that a more precise language is going to solve "most of our problems", it's a bold claim which I believe to be false. No, world problems do not vanish if we were just better at understanding each other, that's not how world problems arise.
Actually, I am not sure that having different meanings of the same word in different contexts is really the problematic part causing ambiguity in conversations.
For example, sarcasm is a much more difficult problem. The words are the same, the meaning of the sentences is the same but the author's intent, the meaning behind those sentences is opposite if they are being sarcastic or not.
Which is a bit ironic, because in the year 2023 it turns out that correctly parsing sentences is an easier problem to solve than extracting meaning from context, even when given a known correct parsing. Lojban solved the wrong problem.
Exactly. And being able to handle ambiguity as a human is one of our strong points. We must not cripple our mental capability to understand and use ambiguity in language, it would a loss.
Why would you want to use a language that eliminates this ambiguity other than in legal or academic contexts? I think sentences like "Fruit flies like a banana." must exist, they are useful in that they are stimulating the recipient's mind to question the senders intentions. It demands further inquiries and questions, which is I think a good thing. In some cases being vague and ambigious is the only way to ask further questions.
A lot of communication is intentionally ambiguous at that. Be it diplomatic texts written to let both sides present a victory, or comedy intentionally obscuring key facts for a later reveal. Having the ability to be unambiguous is great, but human communication is full of situations where that's not what we want.
Ambiguity is an intrinsic quality of language. The first words that an infant learns are exclusively learned through ostensive definitions (defining by pointing). This implies that the meaning of those words is fundamentally different to each of us, as it's founded on our phenomenological experience and not through the dictionary.
Further words are learned to combine previous definitions and more ostensive definition, so ambiguity is carried on.
Lojban does not eliminate the ambiguity of the meaning of the words, but the ambiguity of its syntactical structure.
To me, the ambiguity of language, and the impracticality to change the meaning of words are the fundamental issues preventing humans to enhance the innate cognitive abilities, and the root cause of most human conflicts around communication.
Any profession and culture has its own jargon, this enables them to express the particular quality of their reality with much more accuracy than common language.
So, instead of trying to build a shared language, what we can do is to create a personal Language for each of us. Not for the purpose of communication, but for the purpose of improving our reasoning and internal model of the world, so we can describe and make sense of our particular reality with much more accuracy.
I've been dedicated to building "Interplanetary mind-map", a tool that supports making your language by making your meaning more explicit. [0]
At the same time, I've been using a prototype of it, to build my personal Language. You can browse into each word and see my particular understanding of it. [1]
I think going from the difference in environment in learning first words to the meaning of those words being fundamentally different for everyone is a non sequitur.
Specifically when not defining the ambigous concept „meaning“ and without sketching the assumed mechanism by which they are learned and turned into language.
Lojban could have gone further to eliminate logical ambiguity, allowing monoparsing from sentence to an explicit statement in a framework of computational semantics (e.g. Davidsonian event semantics). That Lojban did not was one of its great failings.
> Lojban means different things to different people