English Learning Horror Stories, Part I: How Natural Language Is Actually Programming

English is my second language, and it is terrible; here's a fascinating story about how English is Satan's tool to torture us hapless souls.

English maps shockingly well to Asymmetric Numeral Systems.

In ANS, you encode symbols backwards, but the decoder reads them in reverse order. English does the exact same thing with descriptions.

Look at a phrase like: "The big, red, leaking coffee container." The actual object is placed at the very end of the array. Your brain has to buffer the adjectives (big, red, leaking, coffee) into memory and hold them in a state machine. You only apply their meaning backward once you hit the noun at the end.

ANS works by assigning shorter bit-lengths to high-probability states. English operates on this exact asymmetrical efficiency. The more frequently a concept is used, the more English aggressively compresses it into irregular shortcuts, short idioms, or silent words (like omitting "that" in "the book [that] I read"). Finnish keeps its systemic suffix architecture uniform regardless of frequency, but English distorts its rules to optimize for conversational throughput.

In English, a linguistic "stack overflow" occurs through a phenomenon called center-embedding.

Because English relies on an ANS-like LIFO stack to resolve meaning, you can theoretically nest relative clauses inside each other indefinitely. However, the human brain has a strict working memory limit (a small buffer size), and pushing too many unfinished clauses onto the stack causes a total parsing failure.

Your brain easily processes a shallow stack depth (1 or 2 clauses).

Depth 0: "The dog chased the cat."

Depth 1: "The dog [that the cat scratched] yelped."

Trigger it!

"The rat [that the cat [that the dog chased] killed] ate the cheese."

To decode this, a human brain has to hold three separate nouns in memory simultaneously before it encounters a single verb to resolve them.

By the time the brain hits the verbs "chased killed ate", the pointer addresses are lost. The short-term memory buffer overflows, and the sentence sounds like complete gibberish, even though it is syntactically valid English code.

Because Finnish relies on arithmetic coding and agglutination, it passes parameters immediately inline via suffixes or forces sequential string concatenation. It natively prevents deep center-embedding, making it nearly impossible to write a structural stack overflow in conversational Finnish.

Example #1: "Minä menen kauppaan." -> "Mä meen kauppaa." -> "Käyn kaupas." -> *grunt*. So we achieve perfect compression.

Example #2: "Minähän sanoin." -> "Noni."

To prevent linguistic stack overflows, English relies heavily on Right-Branching Sentences, which act exactly like Tail-Call Optimization (TCO) in programming.

In computer science, TCO optimizes a recursive function by ensuring the recursive call is the very last operation. This allows the compiler to reuse the current stack frame instead of pushing a new one, keeping memory usage at O(1). English achieves the same O(1) memory usage by shifting modifiers to the end of the sentence.

This here nested structure causes a memory overflow because the brain must hold all nouns in RAM until it hits the verbs at the end: "The rat [that the cat [that the dog chased] killed] ate the cheese."

By converting this into a right-branching structure, English executes TCO: "This is the dog [that chased the cat [that killed the rat [that ate the cheese]]]."

Why your brain doesn't overflow

The brain processes "This is the dog that chased the cat" and immediately clears the variables from active working memory (in the right-branching version).

The cat transitions from the object of the first clause to the subject of the next clause. The brain reuses the same mental "stack frame" to attach the next action ("that killed the rat").

Because memory is cleared sequentially, you can chain this sentence indefinitely without crashing the reader's cognitive buffer.

And so, my child in the Lord, I lay it onto you: English is a deeply villainous language that constantly threatens the delicate balance inside your brain, while Finnish is a salve. "Noni" is completely immune to satanic backmasking.