Difference Between Natural Language and Artificial Language

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Date Submitted: 03/02/2014 11:35 PM

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DIFFERENCES BETWEEN NATURAL LANGUAGE AND ARTIFICIAL LANGUAGE

First of all, natural language existed for thousands of years, nobody knows who designed the language; but artificial languages are synthesized by logicians and computer scientists to meet some specific design criteria.

Natural language means human speech, sign language and writing, as they have developed as means of communication for the human species. This contrasts with artificial languages, which are deliberately invented for a purpose

A natural language is typically used for communication, and may be spoken, signed, or written. Natural language is distinguished from constructed languages and formal languages such as computer-programming languages or the "languages" used in the study of formal logic, especially mathematical logic.

Although there are a variety of natural languages, any cognitively normal human infant is able to learn any natural language while artificial languages are learnt as a course

Computer languages are (or at least should be) well-defined and unambiguous, whereas natural languages are highly ambiguous and loosely defined. Any computer language must be translated (compiled or interpreted) from some predefined syntax and grammar to some computer instructions in deterministic way.

The ambiguity of natural language, well, "syntax", and grammars are not "predefined", and with humor and sarcasm built in the culture, it will be very difficult to translate what a human says to exactly what the expression really means (even another human would have a hard time to do it right 100% of time!). Also, assume such "tool" exists, I would think the "limitation" of the tool, would actually ask people to speak in robotic way, not human way. This is not necessarily a bad thing. A lot of poetry and humor relies on ambiguity, and the ambiguity also allows us to express ourselves very concisely by having an implicit frame of reference.

Ambiguity is the main difference between the two...