Cree#, a morphemic programming language with Cree keywords and concepts
As someone with an interest in both linguistics and programming, I’ve often wondered what programming languages would be like if they had developed from an agglutinating language like Cree rather than the mostly isolating languages of western Europe. English sentences and phrases consist mostly of isolated words joined together by syntactic words: ‘Lie down on the table’. This has carried over to the programming languages we use, which mostly consist of isolated keywords and operators joined together by syntactic rules. e.g. a ‘translation’ of the previous example into Smalltalk-ish pseudocode would look something like:<p><pre><code>    you lieDown; position: (table onTopOf)
</code></pre>
Contrast this to languages like Cree — or Ojibwe, since I can’t find a convenient Cree example — where this sentence becomes as follows, with the verb becoming the central element of the sentence and each word inflected describing its relationship to the others (Valentine 2001):<p><pre><code>      Zhngishin     doopwining.
    you lie prone  on the table
</code></pre>
I’d be really curious to see how a native speaker of such a language would design a programming language — I’m not sure what it would look like, but I suspect it would look remarkably different to the ones we usually use. Corbett’s languages look like an interesting step in this direction, and I’d be interested in knowing more details if they’re available.