[joomy]

Hi all, Kip's developer here! I was going to wait until we had finished the playground and landing page before posting about the project more, but here's the browser-based playground we have so far (thanks to Alperen Keles) for anyone who wants to play with the language: https://alpaylan.github.io/kip/

(The work on JavaScript transpilation just started today and currently doesn't work, but running the language should mostly work, though it probably has bugs, which I'd love to hear about in the repo's issues!)

[yowayb]

I studied Turkish for a few years and remember thinking it could make an interesting programming language (due to the grammatical/agglutinative features). I was gonna call it Ç, but I was never seriously going to make it. Happy to see someone went for it!

[mertd]

Ç is a brilliant name

[gerdesj]

"Kip (meaning "grammatical mood" in Turkish)"

I'm not sure what a grammatical mood is, so I tried a couple of well known translation services and got: kip == "mode". However big G did also manage "modal", "paradigm", "tense" and "module".

For my money: "tense". Just to confuse the issue, tense has several meanings in english! Here I think we are talking about a verbal tense:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zh4thbk#zyh2s82

Tense can also be synonymous with emotion: dangerous/exciting and also as a measure: tension/tight.

[Twey]

In linguistics, tense is a verb conjugation to indicate temporal information, while mood is a conjugation to indicate various kinds of metainformation about the speaker's relationship to the information in the sentence. It's not as common a term as ‘tense’ when discussing English, because English doesn't conjugate for mood, but it is the standard word for describing some features of Turkish morphology such as evidentiality.

Automatic translators, while an impressive and convenient piece of technology, usually focus on providing a plausible gloss in the target language, so typically lose a lot of nuance. For looking up words a dictionary is usually a better bet; for example, Wiktionary has https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kip#Turkish with a link to the explanation of the English word as well.

[thaumasiotes]

> because English doesn't conjugate for mood

It does, but like some other English inflectional patterns the syntax is mostly vestigial.

All I ask is that the two of you be polite to each other has be in subjunctive mood; if it were indicative, it would be are instead.

Something that I find interesting is that, while conjugating verbs for mood is largely vestigial in English, the more general phenomenon of paying close attention to the relationship between the sentence and reality, the focus that mood expresses, is very much alive. It's just that it's mostly moved out of the inflectional system.

[Twey]

It has constructs for a few different moods/modes[1], but no conjugation: the morphology used to form moods is borrowed from other verb forms (in your example, the bare infinitive) that were never (as far as I know!) dedicated mood conjugations.

[1]: pedantically they are ‘modes’ in the linguistic jargon, but often referred to as ‘moods’ in discussions of English grammar: linguistically a mood is the grammatical morphology used to signify a mode, which English lacks.

[thaumasiotes]

> It has constructs for a few different moods/modes[1], but no conjugation: the morphology used to form moods is borrowed from other verb forms (in your example, the bare infinitive) that were never (as far as I know!) dedicated mood conjugations.

Well, this is mixing an argument about the facts with an argument about the history.

On the facts this is a mood expressed by conjugating the verb. It obviously isn't an infinitive form because it's a finite verb. It is identical with the infinitive form, and this is a general rule of English (only observable with this one verb), but there's nothing stopping different forms from being identical, even identical by rule. In Latin the nominative and accusative case of a neuter noun are always identical.

[Twey]

Sorry, I didn't mean to confuse matters — by pulling in the etymology of the morphology I was trying to be generous to the argument. Namely, I thought there might be a chance that the bare infinitive in e.g. the conditional mood is derived from an older true mood (in the linguistic sense, i.e. a verb form that is sufficient to signify the mode), which I would consider a pretty reasonable justification for considering the bare infinitive there to be a true conditional mood, albeit one that happens to be identical to other forms. I couldn't find evidence for it though, and as far as I know it's not a common feature in other Germanic languages.

As for the syntactic argument — I think it would usually be said not to be the case due to the periphrastic nature of the construction. That is, it's not the verb conjugation itself that signifies the mode but the combination of a conjugation (that is used in a variety of different constructions) with the ‘that’ (or ‘would’, aut cetera, for other moods). As with a lot of these things, though, it's significantly a matter of the conventional definition of terms. For instance in English grammar the ‘full infinitive’ ‹to + bare infinitive› is usually considered a conjugation even though it includes an extra particle. Go figure :)

On that note, it's important to distinguish syntax from semantics: the term ‘bare infinitive’ doesn't mean that morphology is _semantically_ infinitive, the infinitive was just picked as the class representative to name that particular morphology, which is known as the ‘bare infinitive’ wherever it occurs. Ditto with ‘past participle’ and ‘present participle’, and especially ‘gerund’ (which is named after a grammatical function that doesn't even exist in English!).

[accidentallfact]

Mood and evidentuality are two somewhat distinct concepts.

Mood denotes the informations factuality, if something is, could be, would be, certainly is so, or there may be moods for direct or indirect commands (tell him to come) and so on.

Evidentiality denotes how the speaker knows - you use different evidentiality if you have directly seen something, if somebody told you, or if you deduced it.

Then there is mirativity, which denotes how expected or unexpecred the information was.

I believe that turkish has all tree.

[Twey]

Oh you're right! I always thought evidentiality was a dedicated Turkish mood — but it's actually a particular use of a tense. TIL :)

[inkyoto]

A grammatical mood indicates the modality of the verb, and some languages possess rich inventories of the grammatical moods. They are called differently in different languages, but mood is an established term in English.

English has indicative («go», «is going» etc), subjunctive / conjunctive / conditional («went» in «as if they went»), imperative («go!»).

German has two conditional moods – Konjunktiv I and II, for example.

Finno-Ugric languages have many more.

[thaumasiotes]

> English has ... subjunctive / conjunctive / conditional («went» in «as if they went»)

That isn't the English subjunctive.

You're correct that this construction expresses the same thing that another language might express by marking a non-indicative mood on the verb, but it would not conventionally be said to use a non-indicative mood. That went is a normal past-tense indicative verb and the modality is expressed by the whole structure of the clause, not just by the inflection of the verb.

In linguistics there's a whole set of parallel vocabulary where one set is for grammatical forms and the mirror set is for the semantics usually expressed by those forms. So you have grammatical "tense" and semantic "time" or grammatical "mood" and semantic "modality". You got the modality right, but not the mood.

Compare the conventional analysis that he will be there tomorrow expresses future time, but is not in future tense because there is no English future tense.

[inkyoto]

> That isn't the English subjunctive.

No, it is not a proper English subjunctive (a correct example would have been «as if they were» – past subjunctive) or «[we suggested] that they go».

I deliberately lumped subjunctive, conjunctive, and conditional together for brevity. Part of the problem is that many English speakers do not differentiate between subjunctive and conjunctive (conditional) and incorrectly label the latter as subjunctive, but that happens because English does not have a conjunctive (conditional) mood.

English subjunctive is translated into other Indo-European languages either as the conjunctive or indicative mood, as there is no 1:1 mapping in existence.

[lowdownbutter]

languagejones has a good overview in this video

https://youtu.be/xdpvR3kaXaQ?si=dcNS-3VcH8AMU7dt

[araes]

Question on some of the syntax. It's neat, and think the idea's cool. Would definitely be something if nothing else for security through obscurity. Is it even code?

However, for some of the number stuff, if you write something like:

  (5'le 3'ün farkını) yaz.
  (3'ün 5'le farkını) yaz.

How does it tell whether it is:

  5 - 3 =  2, or
  3 - 5 = -2  ?

Does it always just return 2 because of the meaning of "farkını" and the placement of 'le and 'ün? Like:

  (5 first, 3 second, difference) write, vs
  (3 second, 5 first, difference) write  ?

Google just gave back:

  Write (the difference between 5 and 3).
  Write (the difference between 3 and 5).

Not especially familiar with Turkish, and mostly had to use translation, yet it looks like a language for defining math theorems? Number following "zero" shall be called "one", number following "one" shall be called "two". Or is that more just a feature of using natural language for the writing syntax?

[joomy]

"fark" here takes two arguments, the first (the minuend) is in instrumental case (-le), the second (the subtrahend) is in genitive case (-in). Now, because of the suffixes of the cases, regardless of the order in which you give the arguments, the type system can figure out which one is supposed to be the minuend and which the subtrahend.

If it helps, you can think of it like named arguments where the name is inferred from the case.

[ronjakoi]

Essentially you could write equivalent code as (vähennä 5:ttä 3:lla) in Finnish

[nurettin]

How do you express |a - b| ?

[joomy]

(bu tam-sayının) mutlak-değeri, (bunun 0'dan büyüklüğü) doğruysa, bu, değilse, bunun -1'le çarpımıdır.

(5'in mutlak-değerini) yaz.

(-5'in mutlak-değerini) yaz.

You can try it in the playground.

[pinkmuffinere]

Disclaimer: I grew up speaking Turkish, but never studied it. I think I can give a common-sense explanation, but can’t give a rigorous “proof” appealing to grammatical rules.

I read “(5’le 3’ün farkını) yaz” as “having 5, 3’s difference write” (of course this is not natural in English). Ie, you’re given 5, you want to take 3, and write the result. Likewise, “(3’ün 5’le farkını) yaz” would be “3’s difference, having 5, write”. Again we are given 5, and want 3’s difference. Because we’re starting with 5, i think there is no ambiguity in the operation to be done — start with 5, subtract 3.

Idk if that actually helps clarify it at all, maybe it gives some intuition

[andro_dev]

The Turkish sentence's expansion would be pretty much like the mathematical expansion of the expression order.

[joomy]

Okay there is an updated web page and playground now: https://kip-dili.github.io/

[sedatk]

Fantastic work, an area I’ve always wanted to explore.

[nhatcher]

Sorry! It was too beautiful not to share it. But I'm sure you can do a show HN once you think is ready.

[joomy]

That's okay, thanks for sharing!