this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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[–] [email protected] 83 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I do partially agree but making the language less and less expressive because some individuals can’t or won’t learn simple rules is harming for everybody else.

[–] LinkOpensChest_wav 33 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Literally^1^ no one is harmed

^1^and I do mean literally, in the classical sense

[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Rules in languages serve the same purpose as standards in engineering. Sure, you don’t have to follow them. And if you want your home’s piping to use 81/13 inch diameters, knock yourself out. But it’s a pain for everyone who will ever be involved with that mess. And a lot of people are involved in your choice of words and grammar.

[–] LinkOpensChest_wav 15 points 2 years ago (2 children)

You're really comparing language to engineering

STEM brainrot take

[–] [email protected] 37 points 2 years ago (1 children)

STEM brainrot take

Gotta love a civil discussion.

[–] LinkOpensChest_wav 10 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I was able to clearly understand your message even though you defied prescriptive conventions by using "gotta"

Gotta love how language evolves. I'm going to fuck up so many conventions today, just you wait and see!

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

You're in a discussion about language but unable to navigate analogy? Or even just be civil and engage in a respectful manner? Maybe sit this one out.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago

Not if I cause them harm.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Normally I say the "usage defines meaning" argument is flimsy at best and actively encourages misuse that ultimately limits the ability for precision and nuance in language. 'Since' isn't causal, 'because' (as one can guess) is. "I've been sick since Thursday" means one thing, "I've been dice because of Thursday" means a different thing.

But then an old farmer will tell you a story about needing to buy some rubbers because they're getting into their tranny and I think, "those words don't mean that to me."

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

the "usage defines meaning" argument is flimsy at best

So what else does? I never understood how you can reason the objective meaning of a bunch of phonemes. If usage doesn't define meaning, you can look up the meaning in a dictionary. But if it's a good dictionary, it deduces the meaning of the word by its usage. There is ultimately no other way.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (2 children)

But then a good dictionary is ultimately personal, contextual, regional, and ephemeral, making it ultimately useless.

I will never recognise 'suposably' as a proper English word. But my children might, and so to their children, until it universally is a correct, proper word. That's the scope of the tide of language.

Its a necessary battle between the old ways and the new, one that I know I am ever drifting to the wrong side of. When some people use the word wrong, they are wrong. When everyone uses the word wrong, they are right. The old guard dies and the new gaurd rises.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

Well put. That's not to say that dictionaries are useless. I use them alot but not in my native language since that's where I know the words. In English, which is my second language, dictionaries are close enough to help me around most of the times. It's like a map. The map isn't useless because a new road is build or a cabin is no more. You can still use the map but don't trust it over reality.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

It's not that language on a whole gets less and less expressive. Some things are more expressive, like youth language often is. Borrowing words from other languages makes a language more expressive. And even in this case: you can still say "because". I don't see any harm done, except in shaming people because their dialect is wRonG and less sophisticated and therefore they are less than.

[–] [email protected] 65 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Languages evolve, but you’re still allowed to have an opinion about how they should evolve.

People call it “political correctness” when you want to change things, or pedantry when you want things to stay the same or revert back.

I think it’s one of those George Carlin scenarios:

Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 2 years ago (3 children)

While language does evolve over time, we shouldn't encourage unnecessary and somewhat negative evolutions of it, and especially not encourage it to change over less time.

When two previously distinct words come to have the same meaning, this can be a problem. First, older written things become less comprehensible. Few of us today could read and understand old english because so many words have changed. The evolution of language has taken a long time to get to that point, at least. But if we encourage the acceleration of this change, something which appears to be happening even without encouragement, how long will it be?

Today, we can still pretty clearly understand things written 200 years ago; some bits are confusing but for the most part it is still clear. If language change accelerates enough, in the future, people may struggle to understand something written only a hundred years ago, or even less.

The second problem is that if the word for a thing goes away, it becomes more difficult to express that concept. Consider the word 'literally' whose meaning has become extremely muddled. In order to express the original concept, we now require additional emphasis. There are other, more difficult to think of terms like that - a concept for which a particular word would have been perfect had the word's meaning not significantly changed.

So when a word's usage is corrected, do not be so quick to defend the misuse of the word through 'language evolves!' If people accept that 'oops, I used that word wrong' and then see if there is already a better word for what they were trying to express to correct themselves with, that is probably better - in most cases.

Even more notably, new words should be used when possible, if an older word doesn't quite fit a newly emerging thing, or even a concept that has existed for some time but has not had a word to describe it precisely. One of my favorite examples of this is the word 'cromulent' which expresses a concept that did not have a specific word for it in common use at the time, even though the concept of 'understandable and linguistically correct' certainly already existed. Also consider the now common word 'emoji' which was coined specifically to represent this concept. This is an excellent evolution of language because it took nothing away. It arose in response to something which did not exist, and described that thing with a word created specifically for it.

That said, fighting against the evolution of language that has already happened and is far too entrenched to ever change is nonsensical. My father, for instance, insists 'cool' should be for temperature description only, even though that word possessed its non-temperature meaning before he was even born. Similarly, sometimes the change is resisted for bad reasons; like the word 'gay'. In these cases, it is best not to try to fight the change, but instead embrace and encourage it.

So ultimately, when a word is used wrong, consider whether the word evolving to the way it is being used is a positive change. If it does not make things better, it's probably best not to encourage it.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

You say this like it's a fact that the word "literally" is worse now than it was before its recent evolution. You're reducing the entire value of a word to a metric of "clarity"/"muddledness", but natural language has value beyond its ability to be technically precise.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 years ago (6 children)

It's worse in that there is now no common way to say what it used to mean, without adding several more words, where previously one would have communicated the meaning clearly.

Anytime a language change increases the likelihood of misunderstanding it definitely has negative effects. It may also have positive effects, but it shouldn't be simply accepted without regard to that.

Now, disagreement on whether a particular change's negative outweighs its positive is going to happen, obviously, but it's important to acknowledge the bad parts exist.

It's also important not to accept a mistake and insist that it's fine because language changes, out of pride and desire to not be mistaken - a trend I definitely see a lot. It's often not 'I am using this word in a different way and have considered it's implications', it's 'I don't want to be wrong so I will insist that I didn't make a mistake, language changes!'

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago

Let's not start deciding what's positive and negative evolution of a language. We all know who gets discriminated against because of this.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (4 children)

gonna respond only to the first sentence because frankly shove off if you think i'm going to read that wall of text.

I assume you are of course the one who gets to decide what language changes are good and which are bad? Or are you going to give some organization the right to decide how we speak?

Honestly such a terrifying way of thinking..

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 years ago

If you are not going to read something, perhaps you should avoid making ignorant comments, considering that for the most part, those topics are already addressed in my posts.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

If you didn't read it, fuck off and don't reply. I decided not to read your comment beyond that because you're an inconsiderate cuss.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago

You believe that others value your time and opinion more than they actually do. If you aren't going to read it, just scroll past

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I haven't seen an argument on English grammar because yesterday

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 years ago

You will not be forgiven for your since

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I’ll save you the trouble of looking it up:

Since as a conjunction can refer both to causation and to the passage of time […], and the mavens believed strongly that since there's potential confusion over which meaning of since is meant, one should avoid since as a causal conjunction.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/since-as-because-usage

As a foreign learner I’ve never heard of this debate. To me, “since” simply has two meanings, like almost every other word in English.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago

naw that ain't the problem it's that I don't like how language is taught as something completely still and unchanging when it very much isn't

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (6 children)

People also tend to forget that dictionaries were compiled for the sake of selling them for profit.

Dictionaries aren't the be all end all of a language.

If something accurately communicates an idea, then it has done its job. You can argue for accuracy, but at the end of the day, fuck off.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (4 children)

I think it's funny when people use the dictionary like it's some perfectly unbiased and authoritative source, rather than a compilation of how people use words

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Holy shit we've really started going after big dictionary now as well? What's next, big water?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

Don't go dragging Nestlé into this

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

Someone compared dictionaries to maps. If the map shows a street that's unusable or doesn't show a street that's clearly there and leads to your goal, don't trust the map over reality. The map needs an update and so do dictionaries

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

a lot of them were made for national pride (not English ones necessarily)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

But even the differences between British and American English are in part out of the national need to separate from each other. English was standardized around the time of the American independence and the first American dictionary was oriented at the British one, later the same guy made a different one to set American spelling apart. Words for Granted made a podcast episode about it.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago

Agreed, we should of kown this.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I think english evolves faster than other languages or at least it has evolved a lot in the last centuries, at least in my limited experience. I can understand old german and medieval spanish with just minor issues... old english? No thanks

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago (3 children)

People huffing and puffing about other people not using words the way they expect: "God this wind is terrible, we need to abolish wind or at least make it blow in a different direction"

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

Language also evolved differently in different regions and culture groups. Here in Louisiana we have much more French terms in average usage than other regions on the US. That doesn't mean that us using those term like "Laissez les bons temps rouler" is wrong at all ( and I do support voice removal of people that disagree) you can't control language because it develops to fill what it is needed for. In some regions conscience speech in important, in others more descriptive language is needed.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Easy way to spot somebody who's never tried to learn another language

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Language shouldnt be an authority defined thing, its defined by the speakers

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

In France there's an actual committee that's there to decide which words come and go from the language (l'Académie Française).

Nobody gives a fuck, in fact I think these days they're mostly just playing catch up by adding the words that get used the most that year.

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