Language is funny.
Someone on Hacker News, while discussing languages, said, ‘I suspect “human language” has a very specific meaning among linguists.’ I responded, “‘human language’ actually means very little among linguists. If he were being very precise he’d say “natural language”,’ which I think is true. after all, if your professional context is almost always natural language—and you are not a xenolinguist—you probably wouldn’t have any semantically-invested terminology to distinguish among species.
But now I’m thinking about the analogous case, which would be asking a programmer, ‘So, what language are you thinking of using for your next project?’ and receiving the answer, ‘Uh, English. duh.’
Which is making me giggle.
