X-Nico

unusual facts about syntax


Japanese pronouns

Some linguists suggest that the Japanese language does not have pronouns as such, since, unlike pronouns in most other languages that have them, these words are syntactically and morphologically identical to nouns.


Aleksei Gastev

However, the use of metaphor, lyrical expressiveness, and repetitiveness of syntax undoubtedly make Gastev a true lyrical poet, with influences ranging from Verhaeren and Walt Whitman to the Russian Futurists.

Alfred Aho

Steve Johnson used the bottom-up LALR parsing algorithms to create the syntax-analyzer generator yacc, and Michael E. Lesk and Eric Schmidt used Aho's regular-expression pattern-matching algorithms to create the lexical-analyzer generator lex.

André Martinet

The Prague School of linguistics was one of Martinet's main influences, and he is known for pioneering a functionalist approach to syntax which led to a violent polemic with Noam Chomsky.

Andrew Schelling

After taking up study of the Arapaho language, a Native American language in the Algonquian family, he wrote From the Arapaho Songbook, a serial poem in 108 stanzas that incorporated words and syntax from Arapaho.

Behaghel's laws

They were formulated by the Linguist Otto Behaghel in the last volume of his four volume work Deutsche Syntax: Eine geschichtliche Darstellung (published 1923-1932).

Blink element

While Bert Bos of the World Wide Web Consortium has produced a Document Type Definition that includes syntax for the blink element (defining it as a phrase element on a par with elements for emphasis and citations), the comments in the DTD explain that it is intended as a joke.

Busy waiting

In programs that never end (such as operating systems), infinite busy waiting can be implemented by using unconditional jumps as shown by this NASM syntax: jmp $.

Crystal Reports

Fields from these tables can be placed on the report design surface, and can also be used in custom formulas, using either BASIC or Crystal's own syntax, which are then placed on the design surface.

David Wynn Miller

In 2005, Montclair, New Jersey resident Brenda Rickard was arrested and charged with orchestrating a $30 million mortgage scam: "Rickard, who claimed her name is :Brenda :Rickard, is a follower of :Judge: David-Wynn: Miller, who gives seminars around the country and advocates speaking in the 'true language,' which features odd punctuation and syntax. 'I have no problem with the complaint against me as long as it’s in the truthful language,' Rickard told the judge."

Declarative programming

Such systems, typically using a domain-specific XML namespace, may include abstractions of SQL database syntax or parameterised calls to web services using representational state transfer (REST) and SOAP.

Dizzy Trout

Trout broadcast the Tigers games with Van Patrick and became popular with Detroit fans for his self-effacing humor, scrambled syntax, and folksy demeanor.

English Braille

In the finalized form as of 2013, UEB upgrades English Braille Grade 2 (the literary coding used in several slightly-variable forms in different countries), obsoletes Computer Braille Code by making email/website/programming syntax part of literary coding, and in some ways competes with Nemeth Code by adding additional math-notation (albeit Taylor-style with the numerals overwriting letters rather than overwriting punctuation as in Nemeth) to the literary coding.

Eustace Miles

He was a prolific author on diverse subjects including health (e.g. "Fitness for Play and Work" 1912), athletics ("An Alphabet of Athletics"), diet ("The Failures of Vegetarianism" 1902), ancient history ("A History of Rome up to 500AD, with Essays, Maps and Aids to Memory" 1901) and Classics ("Comparative Syntax of Greek and Latin") with many of his books still available on Amazon.

Gas Works Park

Udo Weilacher: Syntax of Landscape. Basel Berlin Boston: Birkhauser Publisher 2008.

Geshi

GeSHi Generic Syntax Highlighter, a software library that allows syntax highlighting of source code

Gujarati grammar

The grammar of the Gujarati language is the study of the word order, case marking, verb conjugation, and other morphological and syntactic structures of the Gujarati language, an Indo-Aryan language native to the Indian state of Gujarat and spoken by the Gujarati people.

HOAS

Higher-order abstract syntax, representing the abstract syntax of a programming language

IBM PL/S

Gio Wiederhold and John Ehrman, "Inferred SYNTAX and SEMANTICS of PL/S", Proceedings of the SIGPLAN symposium on Languages for system implementation 1971, in SIGPLAN Notices 6(10) October 1971

Interrupts in 65xx processors

In the above code fragment, the symbol % is MOS Technology and WDC standard assembly language syntax for a bitwise operand.

Iztok Mlakar

The language of most of Mlakar's songs are based on the distinctive dialects of these areas, which have been strongly influenced by Italian and Friulian, especially in vocabulary and syntax.

James B. Greenough

Following the lead of Goodwin's Moods and Tenses (1860), he set himself to study Latin historical syntax, and in 1870 published Analysis of the Latin Subjunctive, a brief treatise, privately printed, of much originality and value, and in many ways coinciding with Berthold Delbrück's Gebrauch des Conjunctivs und Optativs in Sanskrit und Griechischen (1871), which, however, quite overshadowed the Analysis.

Jan Burton

Jan Burton is a Welsh music producer best known for his work with ex-Fluke member Mike Tournier in their joint project, Syntax.

List comprehension

The Glasgow Haskell Compiler has an extension called parallel list comprehension (also known as zip-comprehension) that permits multiple independent branches of qualifiers within the list comprehension syntax.

Maximal munch

For instance, in the C programming language, the statement x=y/*z; (without any whitespace) will probably lead to a syntax error, since the /* character sequence initiates a (unintended) comment that is either unterminated or terminated by the end token */ of some later, unrelated actual comment (comments in C do not nest).

Mother tongue mirroring

In “The awful German language” Mark Twain humorously explained the difficulties of German syntax and morphology by mirroring long sentences in English.

Natural language understanding

For example, Wayne Ratliff originally developed the Vulcan program with an English-like syntax to mimic the English speaking computer in Star Trek.

NetRexx

The syntax and object model of NetRexx differ from Object REXX, another IBM object-oriented variant of REXX which has been released as open source software.

Paul Platero

He has published articles about the syntax and grammar of Navajo, and co-edited an overview of the Athabaskan languages.

Pazurgo

Once all of the solution word chains have been discovered, the remaining available letters form the solution to the Scramble clue, when those letters are unscrambled in the correct order.

Peter Naur

His last name is the N in the BNF notation (Backus-Naur form), used in the description of the syntax for most programming languages.

PL/I

A compiler developed at Cornell University for teaching a dialect called PL/C, had the unusual capability of never failing to compile any program, through the use of extensive automatic correction of many syntax errors and by converting any remaining syntax errors to output statements.

Portable Content Format

The PCF embodies a high-level declarative model that is based on industry standard formats, including XML syntax, MIME types and UML.

Preeta Samarasan

Evening Is the Whole Day focuses on the dark secrets of an affluent Malaysian Indian family (also living in Ipoh), and has been praised for its lyrical, inventive language, often using untranslated Tamil words, and using aspects of Bahasa syntax, such as reduplicatives as intensifiers.

Radoslav Večerka

His lifelong research focus is primarily on Paleoslavic studies (with a special emphasis on syntax and lexicography), on Old Church Slavonic in the larger context of cultural, historical and literary domain, as well as the comparative Slavic etymology and history.

RoboMind

The syntax of RoboMind however is different and corresponds more directly to main stream scripting languages, such as JavaScript.

Rudolf Carnap

In the U.S, the concept of logical syntax helped the development of natural language processing and compiler design (the Parrot virtual machine and LLVM).

Space syntax

There have also been moves to return to combine space syntax with more traditional transport engineering models, using intersections as nodes and constructing visibility graphs to link them by various researchers, including Bin Jiang, Valerio Cutini and Mike Batty.

Split ergativity

Split ergativity is shown by languages that have a partly ergative behaviour, but employ another syntax or morphology—usually accusative—in some contexts.

Standard French

The syntax, morphology, and orthography of Standard French is explained in various works on grammar and style such as the Bescherelle, a reference summary of verb conjugations first compiled in the 19th century by the Bescherelle brothers from France, and Le Bon Usage written in the 20th century by Belgian grammarian Maurice Grevisse.

Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura

Music of the Bible Revealed was her magnum opus; a massive work covering the entire Hebrew Bible, decoding the cantillation marks (as musical notes which support the syntax and meaning of the words) of its 24 books, to music.

Thompson shell

The Thompson shell syntax for redirection with < and >, and piping with "?title=DOS">DOS, OS/2 and Microsoft Windows.

Tok Pisin

Derek Bickerton's analysis of creoles, on the other hand, claims that the syntax of creoles is imposed on the grammarless pidgin by its first native speakers: the children who grow up exposed to only a pidgin rather than a more developed language such as one of the local languages or English.

Visual J++

Visual J# (pronounced "Jay Sharp") is a Microsoft language whose syntax is close to Java, part of the .NET Framework.

Winfred P. Lehmann

In his last book (2002), he assembled extensive data from the nominal and verbal systems, from the lexicon, phonology, and syntax of the ancient IE languages, to argue that Pre-Indo-European was active/stative in alignment, rather than nominative/accusative.

Word order

Language Universals and Linguistic Typology: Syntax and MorphologyBernard Comrie (1981) – this is the authoritative introduction to word order and related subjects.

Xcode

Xcode 4.4 includes support for automatic synthesizing of declared properties, new Objective-C features such as literal syntax and subscripting, improved localization, and more.


see also