What is a Technoglot?

I am a geek, a dweeb, and a nerd. On the other hand, I have lived almost 50 years in the land of the "normal" and I have survived and have even thrived at times. I also started off with a love of languages -- studying French in high school, continuing with German and Russian in college or after, and working on Farsi and Spanish nowadays. In high school and college, I learned the basics (or more) of about 14 computer languages from assembler to JCL to COBOL to FORTRAN to LISP to C. I have also been involved with music (violin and voice), art (lithography and drawing), and "crafts" (which can also attain the level of art, in my opinion) such as weaving and woodworking.

Language shapes thought and thought shapes language. This is true of all languages, be they "natural" languages, computer languages, or the languages of music, art, and craft. The inclination of Russian speakers to enter into the passive form or the propensity of the French to fall into allusion and metaphor reflect (or mold?) the way they are perceived and interact with the world. A programmer starting from the object-oriented world will look at problems from an object-oriented viewpoint as someone starting from a "structured" language environment will have their own orientation.

And here we start to show the differences between languages. What does "object-oriented" mean? How does it differ from "structured"? What is allusion? What is passive? Even when we believe that we are speaking in the same language, our history, education, experience, and environment changes what we actually hear and understand. An Inuit may have more than a dozen words for "snow" and Greek may have five (or more) words for "love" but in order to translate that to a language which does not have those words you end up with a definition that is not always able to be used directly within the context of a sentence or thought. English has grown to be the most widely spoken (not necessarily first language) language in the world by its extreme inclusionistic attitude; if you don't have the word in English then adopt it.

Communication is the process of producing information, transporting it, and understanding it. This happens with speech which is created, spoken, and heard. Or with sign language which is created, formed, and seen. It also happens between a user and a computer which is essentially a task of translation from one medium (screen display, keyboard, mouse) and language (symbol, letter, position) to/from storage and analysis. It also happens directly between computers in a method of communication protocols.

Protocols consist of the syntax and semantics of a language. I have worked with protocols most of my life -- from learning English as a baby, to learning to program, to more than 20 years of design and implementation of protocols allowing both data and signalling communication between microprocessors (or computers, if you prefer). In this area, I have published books on Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) (see "ISDN Implementor's Guide" at amazon.com) and Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) architectures ("ADSL: Standards, Implementation, and Architecture") which help to explain how these protocols work and can be used. From my work on these, and dozens of other data, transport, and signalling protocols, I have a sound foundation for understanding and defining other protocols that may not even yet be created.

Yet computer-to-computer protocols are still "easy". Why? Because the same definitions are used for the sender (transmitter) and receiver. If communication fails, it is because something was not implemented correctly or the definition of the protocol was faulty. So, it is altered until it does work.

But the the same is not true for user-to-computer and people-to-people communication. Why? Because people do not use the same language as other people or computers. Even people who are both, in theory, speaking the same language really are not. This is because their understanding (as opposed to hearing, seeing, or feeling) of the language is based on their own viewpoint which, in turn, is created by their history, education, and environment (physical, societal, and cultural).

So, back to the beginning and the title. What is a technoglot? It is someone who "speaks tech". In these blogs, I will strive to help understanding of technology for the non-technologist and to communicate ideas from one language to another. I hope that you have fun and that my blogs are useful.