Saturday, March 26, 2011

Why English is good for us as a technical language

So if you have read about HTML, you know that a tag can have child tags and a parent tag. Children of children are descendants (recursively). Parent of parent is an ancestor (recursively again). A tag also has sibling tags. The children of the sibling of parent tag can at best be called a cousin.

Now think if you were going to be taught the same thing in Hindi.

HTML me tag hote hain. Har tag ka ek pita hota hai (Maata nahi hoti). Ek tag ke 0 ya 0 se adhik bachche tags ho sakte hain. Unhe ham putra tag kahenge (putri kyon nahi?). Ek tag ka sirf ek hi pita ho sakta hai. HTML tag ka koi pita nahi hota, isliye woh sarvochh poorvaj kahlata hai. Pita ka pita, yani pitamah tag bhi ho sakta hai. Agar pita ke pita ki shrinkhala banayi jaye to woh sab tag poorvaj kahlayenge. Usi tarah putra ke putra (pautra tag) aur agar unki shrinkala banayi jaaye to we sab vanshaj kahlayenge. Har tag ke bhai tag bhi hote hain (bahnein nahi hoti). Bhaiyon me kuch agraj honge (coming before) aur kuch anuj (coming later).

I think that all the books on HTML would become so funny if we had to read stuff like this.

We should be grateful that we have a foreign language in which we read all the technical stuff :D