I can’t help but think about 1984’s newspeak whenever I see something like the abominable “unalive”. I know the reasons are different for this particular one, but I agree that we seem to be moving into that kind of direction.
For me it’s adjective/superlative escalation. Hey, this bagel is awesome. It fills me with awe. It’s much better than this soda which is terrible, it strikes me with terror how bad it is. It results in having to throw in intensifiers, which we’re exhausting as well. Wow this movie is so fucking good. It was worth leaving the house for.
I’ve also been both a second language teacher and second language learner. It is really hard to teach a language where 50% of the words are culture dependent and old texts are completely irrelevant. It’s very hard to learn simple language and be told it’s wrong now.
People talk about descriptivist drift like it’s 100% inevitable or even good, ignoring that we have finally reached an era of long term preservation of text and speech, and of global communication. We could be the first generation to be understood plainly for millenia. And what we are deciding to do instead is to make language from 100 years ago sound like Chaucer.
The printing press was invented in 1440, the era of theoretical long-term-preservation has been here and languages keep changing despite it. We aren’t going to hit the brakes on the specific period and culture that you happened to have been born into either.
The irony of someone named Soggy telling me about data preservation on paper is wonderful.
It’s not even really the change, it’s the rate of change. We are accelerating towards mutually unintelligible dialects at an outstanding rate, and at the same time do-nothing linguistic graduates are pleased to denigrate the idea of at least having a single widely-understood vocabulary so that a Malaysian can speak to a Scotsman without having to carry a dictionary.
Fully explaining why the thing you’re asking for is both impossible and undesirable is a job for an anthropology thesis, but the tl;dr version is that it’s a short and straight line from your position to advocating for cultural genocide.
Go on, lecture an Irish person about cultural genocide. I so wish we had a culture but we don’t speak Irish anymore so of course we are a grey blob that nobody would recognise as distinct anymore 😪
Edit: downvote and run when “we just observe 💛” college rhetoric meets physical reality.
The reason most Americsn linguistics students equate language and culture is because a foreign language is the only different culture they’ve ever been exposed to.
We should probably resist hyper simplifying language, but whatever, I guess.
I can’t help but think about 1984’s newspeak whenever I see something like the abominable “unalive”. I know the reasons are different for this particular one, but I agree that we seem to be moving into that kind of direction.
“We need a new, more powerful, word for things that are bad and wrong. Badong.”
For me it’s adjective/superlative escalation. Hey, this bagel is awesome. It fills me with awe. It’s much better than this soda which is terrible, it strikes me with terror how bad it is. It results in having to throw in intensifiers, which we’re exhausting as well. Wow this movie is so fucking good. It was worth leaving the house for.
I’ve also been both a second language teacher and second language learner. It is really hard to teach a language where 50% of the words are culture dependent and old texts are completely irrelevant. It’s very hard to learn simple language and be told it’s wrong now.
People talk about descriptivist drift like it’s 100% inevitable or even good, ignoring that we have finally reached an era of long term preservation of text and speech, and of global communication. We could be the first generation to be understood plainly for millenia. And what we are deciding to do instead is to make language from 100 years ago sound like Chaucer.
The printing press was invented in 1440, the era of theoretical long-term-preservation has been here and languages keep changing despite it. We aren’t going to hit the brakes on the specific period and culture that you happened to have been born into either.
The irony of someone named Soggy telling me about data preservation on paper is wonderful.
It’s not even really the change, it’s the rate of change. We are accelerating towards mutually unintelligible dialects at an outstanding rate, and at the same time do-nothing linguistic graduates are pleased to denigrate the idea of at least having a single widely-understood vocabulary so that a Malaysian can speak to a Scotsman without having to carry a dictionary.
Fully explaining why the thing you’re asking for is both impossible and undesirable is a job for an anthropology thesis, but the tl;dr version is that it’s a short and straight line from your position to advocating for cultural genocide.
Sure it is. Short and straight.
Go on, lecture an Irish person about cultural genocide. I so wish we had a culture but we don’t speak Irish anymore so of course we are a grey blob that nobody would recognise as distinct anymore 😪
Edit: downvote and run when “we just observe 💛” college rhetoric meets physical reality.
The reason most Americsn linguistics students equate language and culture is because a foreign language is the only different culture they’ve ever been exposed to.
Agree++