Thinking About Language

My interest in language has always gone beyond computer (programming and data encoding) languages. Language and by linguistics fascinated me years before I wrote my first computer program.

Hence a web page about language in general. It's intended to be a mixture of things I've written and of links to interesting and important papers elsewhere.

A lot of issues in the programming language, data encoding and data processing fields have analogues and aspects in the wider fields of language and linguistics. It isn't just for language buffs. And a lot of this stuff is just plain fun.

Writing:

Charity is a little history of the word "charity". There's a lot to be learned from it.

A Link:

You'll find references to George Miller's The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information all over the web in all sorts of contexts. It's most obvious practical applications in the computer context are in the design of visual user interfaces (GUIs) and in the design of simple wiki-like markup languages.

24 September 2004