What features of natural languages should programmers investigate?

We watched a presentation by Ola Bini on Expressing abstraction—Abstracting expression, and the language geek in me got very excited when he introduced some natural language examples of different modes of expression.

But I was soon disappointed by his choices:

• simile
• metaphor
• redundancy

Now, these are perfectly worthy topics for consideration, but if we really want to explore alien paradigms, how about we venture further afield. Here are a few:

• Ergative alignment
• Classificatory verbs
• Extreme pro-drop
• Translating ‘yes’ and ‘no’