Soggy comments on Living language

[–] Soggy@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] TheOctonaut@mander.xyz 4 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] Soggy@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago (1 child)

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.

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[–] TheOctonaut@mander.xyz 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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.

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