Why I started getting interested in Natural Languages

I was, am and will be an ill-literate in fine arts. However, allow me to make a reference to music as it extremely close to my heart. I know this much that there is lot of science and engineering that lies within music(art); and I find the converse is also true. Both Science and Engineering have lot of overtones of art, in my humble opinion. A case in point is the symmetry in Maxwell's equations.

I vividly remember our English Professor repeatedly telling us, during our Undergraduate days, "Boys, English is for Life." Later on I moved from being student of Physics to Computer Science which meant transition towards Engineering from Science. And today, I repeatedly visualize that writing a good piece has as much of engineering as writing a good piece of code; one deals with natural languages and the other with that of computer. I know that there is a whole field of computer science in natural language processing but let me not digress.

As kids We (I believe I am not alone) were always told to concentrate on the Sciences - Math, Physics, Chemistry... Languages and Social Sciences were always side-lined.  But today, as I look back, I feel Humanities should have been given equal importance if not more.

So, these are some of the reasons why I started getting interested in Natural(Spoken/Written) Languages(apart from the artistic ones):-

• Thoughts are infinite in nature but words are finite. However, I am not sure of the former's mathematical nature - whether the are countably infinite or uncountably infinite. One needs to arrange, re-arrange and engineer words to convey thoughts.
• Syntax and Semantics of Natural Languages are extremely fuzzy unlike that of programming languages where they are extremely precise. This is a challenge for the Computer Scientists in the field of Natural Language Processing but it makes Writers' lives very exciting.
• Thoughts can be packed in varying dosages using language. And I find it very interesting.