Unpopular Opinion
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
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Vote the opposite of the norm.
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Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
6. Defend your opinion
This is a bit of a mix of rules 4 and 5 to help foster higher quality posts. You are expected to defend your unpopular opinion in the post body. We don't expect a whole manifesto (please, no manifestos), but you should at least provide some details as to why you hold the position you do.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
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What I mean is, English's spelling, pronunciation, and grammar rules seem to Me to be highly optional in comparison with other languages I know a few things about. It's a less consistent language. English has tons of words that you'll mispronounce if you only read them, because they don't follow the majority convention. See: epitome, and all the many words that have the "ough" substring and use it to mean different sounds.
Compare that to French, where a government agency controls the spelling and pronunciation to make sure all the words are properly French enough. Or Japanese, where the structure of hiragana and katakana reduces the number of vowels that can be used. And sure, Japanese has Kanji, which is just as ridiculous as English, but Kanji's chaos only exists in written Japanese, while English has all that pronunciation weirdness.
For a long time, I believed that inconsistency in English was a deficit, and that's a common opinion from Anglos and adult learners alike. But then I learned the history of that inconsistency, about the many different groups that settled England, and I formed a new belief: it's an adaptation. You know, I used a bit of evolutionary biology. "What niche does this trait help to fill?" And this inconsistency means that English speakers are really good at adapting to new words with new rules. We do it all the time.
You know, I've followed Spanish gender discourse a bit, and it's a bit embarassing for the Spanish speakers. The average Spanish speaker views gender-neutral language like "latinx" as Anglo meddling in their culture, and rejects it as a form of cultural imperialism. But as far as I can tell, "latinx" originated on Spanish geek message boards, as a math joke. Now, English speakers get really upset about changing their language to be more inclusive too. But for many Spanish people, changing their language feels like being colonised by the British. Now, the renaissance of neopronouns and identity terms in English might just be a function of population size. But I dunno, Arabic and Mandarin have a lot of speakers too. I can't shake the feeling that the transphobic hispanics are hitting on something valid: maybe English is better at changing for queer people.
I think any fan of Vampire: The Masquerade would do well to learn it. Which, I know, is a bit flippant. But that's where I learned it. And I genuinely think geek culture is comparatively full of Latin and Greek, what with all the science fiction and fantasy and mediaeval words. You just pick up that stuff if you read a lot of books or play a lot of games, it's part of life.
And I don't know if you've noticed, but Japanese nerds know a suspicious amount of German!
English having "highly optional" pronunciation and grammar rules is not considered to be true by linguists, so you'll have to give me an example of what you mean. All languages have exceptions and idiosyncracies, and none are considered to be more or less "consistent" (whatever that means) than any other. They may have very different systems, but all of those systems are considered to contain about the same amount of total complexity.
This is a common misconception among people learning to look at language through the eyes of a linguist that always takes a while to fully wrap their heads around: writing is not language.
Writing is just a conventional way of encoding language, nothing more. Writing systems and spelling rules are historical accidents, and linguists ignore them completely when doing linguistic work. All we're concerned with is grammar, the unconscious system of rules that govern a native speaker's spoken (or signed, in the case of signed languages) output, and paying attention to orthography (writing) only makes that internal system harder to access. This is why linguists created the International Phonetic Alphabet to write the sounds of all languages in a (mostly) consistent manner, completely ignoring writing conventions.
The most straightforward way to show that spoken language and writing are completely separate and almost unrelated systems is the following: all human children acquire a native language automatically and seemingly without effort if they're exposed to it as an infant, but writing systems and spelling conventions must be explicitly taught once they're older.
"Acquisition" vs. "learning" is the difference between learning to walk and learning to build a birdhouse. When children reach the appropriate developmental stage, they will learn to walk, automatically, whether their parents help them or not. And, once they've learned to do so, they cannot explain how they do it to anyone else - they just do. Language is the same way - it's an innately programmed unconscious behavior, an "instinct" as Steven Pinker famously put it.
Building a birdhouse, on the other hand, is not something that happens automatically - it's a process that must be explicitly taught by someone else, and once the person has learned to do so they can also explain the process to others.
So, for these reasons I have to disagree that English is any "better at loanwords" than any other language. Linguistically speaking (that is, completely ignoring writing systems), English could maybe be considered "better" at some aspects of loanwords (its less complex morphology allows for adaptation without adding any new "word-pieces" - see Spanish having to fit borrowed verbs into its -ar-conjugation class, for example), but it's much worse at other aspects. For example, English's less common vowel phonology often makes loanwords sound very different than they do in their original language - we need go no further than Japanese, where straightforward ka-ra-o-ke becomes in English the monstrosity "kerree-owkee".
I'm not a sociolinguist, so I don't feel comfortable speaking authoritatively on gendered language discourse, but what I would suggest is that if English is better at adapting for queer people, that's much more likely to be due to the culture of the speakers than due to the architecture of the grammar, in my opinion.
Finally, if any of this has been interesting to you and you'd like to learn more about looking at language from a linguist's perspective, I highly recommend Steven Pinker's very readable bestseller "The Language Instinct" as a starting point.