Hey, I get it. It’s much harder to acknowledge the harmful biases you’re showing in this comment and be a force for positive change than it is to just reflexively lash out at the messenger.
Until that happens though, the problem will remain, and you’ll remain a part of it.
She’ll clear her own orbit eventually! You’ll see!
Eris may be more massive, but Pluto is larger.
Reminds me of “beef milk” from Parks and Rec.
I mean, that’s actually what happens though. Two weeks ago my wife and I were setting up two friends of ours on a blind date, and literally her first question was “how tall is he?” She of course got pissy when I asked what I should tell him if he asked about her weight.
The manosphere is only able to capitalize on this rhetoric because it’s largely based in truth. Hashtag not all women, but enough of them for practically every guy under six feet to have a rejection story for being too short.
To act like stuff like this isn’t happening to guys daily is being willfully ignorant, and not working to change this culture is only going to drive more men to the horrible people who at least acknowledge that their problems are real.
you all missed the fucking point entirely
So what is your point then?
If that’s the way you want it. I’m still here if you have any other questions.
I took “THEY ARE NOT ENGLISH WORDS. THEY ARE WORDS UNDERSTOOD AND USED BY ENGLISH SPEAKING PEOPLE.” as your point due to the use of caps, and so that’s what I directed my response above to, but I may have been mistaken.
So, let’s do it this way, then. What is your point? That way I can be sure to address it directly.
mikä tahansa kelluttaa venettäsi
That’s English for, “whatever floats your boat.” But you probably already knew that.
I address this in my response above.
I’ve spent more than ten years of my life studying this as my profession. I’m not trying to prove that I’m right here - that was never in question - I’m trying to use my knowledge to help you understand why you’re wrong, if you’ll let me.
I recommend that you read my giant wall of text if you’re at all interested in looking at language from a scientific perspective, and I’m happy to answer any further questions you have.
Also, I address “all words are English now” above if you’re interested.
I’m still waiting for that generalization.
THEY ARE NOT ENGLISH WORDS. THEY ARE WORDS UNDERSTOOD AND USED BY ENGLISH SPEAKING PEOPLE.
And I’m asking you what the difference is. What is the metric by which you can determine that one word is an English word, and another word is merely a word understood by English-speaking people?
Since this seems to be yet another non-starter for a productive conversation, here’s what you’re missing:
A word is an English word when a native speaker of English unconsciously uses that word to another speaker of English with the expectation of being understood.
It doesn’t matter what the origin of a word is - it only matters that English speakers use the word with the natural expectation of being understood. So, “Let’s go do karaoke” is fine. “Karaoke” is a word of English. “I love eating sushi” is also fine. “Sushi” is a word of English. “Let’s hanasu about Lemmy” is not fine. “Hanasu” is not a word of English. This is why “eigo wo hanashiteimasu!” is not English.
(I realize that there is nuance here, for example an anime club using more Japanese words than the general populace. Here we either can say that a word like “bishounen” is a word of English in specific speech communities, or draw a general (but arbitrary) line that a word isn’t an English word until X percent of the population uses it fluently. We could also say that “bishounen” hasn’t fully become a word of English until that anime fan would use the word to a stranger on the street with the expectation of being understood. Either way, though, it remains the case that English words are defined by usage, not etymology.)
(Note that the same phenomena occur with more “learned” English terms that not everyone knows as well. That is, we see the same behavior between “bishounen” and a lesser-used English word like “adze”, just among different speech communities. As such, there’s no objectively useful reason to distinguish them, since they show the same pattern of behavior.)
It doesn’t matter when the word was borrowed either. Older borrowings and younger borrowings are all adapted to the phonology of English - note that Schadenfreude isn’t pronounced in English like it is in German, for example. That’s because it has become a word of English, and has changed phonologically in the process to fit the phonological constraints of English.
Further evidence that borrowings become words of their borrowing language is the fact that these words are treated identically to native words by both synchronic and diachronic grammatical processes. For example, sound change is just as regular for borrowed words as it is for native words. Borrowed nouns function in sentences the exact same way as native nouns do. Again, there is no objectively useful reason to distinguish older and younger borrowings, because they behave the same way.
Note, however, that “loanword” is still a useful categorical distinction, since linguistic reconstruction only works on inherited words, and does not work with loanwords or words otherwise created (past the point in history that they entered the linguistic system in question, at least).
But as for a useful categorical distinction between recent loanwords and older loanwords? As long as they’re fluently used by native speakers, there really isn’t one. (I’ll admit that this is a slight oversimplification - we can talk more about this if you’re interested.)
HOWEVER, that’s not to say that speakers don’t have intuitions about borrowed words, because they absolutely do, and that’s what I think you’re hitting on with your comments here.
“Schadenfreude” and “entrepreneur” feel more like borrowings than “cheese” and “justice” do. This is because the sounds of the word pattern like other words that we “recognize” as being German or French, and the ability to make these identifications are likely also correlated with type/degree of education. The ability to recognize borrowings is also heavily due to spelling conventions, but we have to remember that writing is not language. But that’s an essay for another day.
Ultimately, it’s important that we realize that the subjective ability to identify a word as a loan does not mean that the word behaves any differently from any other word, and the behavior of language is the only objectively useful means that we have of scientifically describing the structure of language.
Or maybe it’s not all that important to realize. But it is the most relevant point in this discussion. Feel free to follow up with any questions you might have.
Says the one trying to “um, ackshually” entrepreneur and schadenfreude out of being English words.
Just take the L, my dude or dudette. You’ll get 'em next time.
Ooh, this is a fun game.
Ok, how about “tea”? Is that an English word?
How about “chef”? If not, then how about “chief”?
“Dexterity”?
“History”?
“Anger?” “Egg?” “Justice?”
What about “circle”, “cheese”, and “wine”?
Do they count as English if the borrowing predates English? “Sand” and “tin”? “Silver”?
What about if they really predate English like “ox”?
Not sure why you’re being downvoted here. This absolutely is the go-to quote for monolingual English-speaking laypeople who think that English is “exceptional” in some way - whether that be “bad” or “good” - when in reality English is a pretty unremarkable language overall.
It does have a few mildly interesting idiosyncrasies, but “polysemy” and “having loanwords” (even “having a large percentage of loanwords”) are not really among them.
You’ll have to define what you mean by “stricter with grammar” here - speakers of all languages make grammaticality judgments equally easily. What about German grammar makes it “stricter” than English?
Yes, it would be significantly more stable than a phonetic system. Depending on how you measured it, phonetic systems would likely last around a generation at most, but phonemic systems might last for upwards of a century before they become conventionalized enough to no longer be a near-1-1 match for the ‘Standard’ dialect (again, depending on how you measured it).
It’s worth noting that English’s current orthography is already mostly phonemic though (that is, it’s a combination of multiple different systems which are themselves mostly phonemic), and that the vast majority of the world’s alphabetic or syllabic writing systems are phonemic, not phonetic.
This is straightforwardly demonstrable in English by the use of, for example, the letter “t” for a wide variety of different consonant sounds in the same dialects: unaspirated and aspirated [t] (stop vs. top), released vs. unreleased [t] (stop vs. bit), glottal stop (batman), flap (butter), glottalized [t] (caught), etc.
Phonetic writing systems are very rare, because native speakers of a language are practically always unaware of their language’s sub-phonemic distinctions. Virtually no American English speakers, for example, are aware that they pronounce the “t” in top and stop differently.
So, replacing current English orthography wouldn’t even be “switching to a phonemic system”. English already uses a phonemic writing system - you’d just be switching to a different phonemic writing system (though, admittedly, one that has fewer subregularities/“inconsistencies” (for now)).
That assumes that phonemic splits and mergers never happen, or that different dialects don’t undergo contradictory sound changes. It’s already the case that different dialects have different numbers of phonemes (see the Mary/merry/marry distinctions, for example).
It’s not possible to design an “evergreen” writing system for any natural human language. Either you have to give up the benefits of standardization synchronically in order for different dialects to be equally expressible, or you have to give them up diachronically to account for language change, or both.
Pretentious in the opposite direction, though maybe that’s to be expected coming from someone trained in Latin grammar but not linguistics.
English is just as intelligible as any other natural human language is, and all languages borrow (including Latin!). English stands out a bit for its high rate of borrowing compared to other languages, but, again, this behavior is completely normal and there are a number of languages with even higher rates of borrowings than English has.
Even if we were to adopt something like the Shavian alphabet, it would only work for a few generations at most until sound change and dialect divergence built up enough to once again strongly divorce spelling from pronunciation. Not to mention the fact that it’s impossible to come up with a phonetic* alphabet that accounts in a useful way for dialect differences, even just in American English.
This has already happened with hangul - spellings that were once phonetic (though, again, in only certain dialects) have now become conventional due to sound change.
So, you’d end up having to either completely replace the alphabet again every hundred or so years, or you’d be right back where we currently are. Plus, interventions into the spelling system will a) make older publications harder to read without mass-translating them all into the new systems every few decades and b) will create reading difficulties for the generations that end up having to switch with each new update.
Not to mention spelling things the way we currently do (imperfectly) preserves etymological information about the words in question.
Not to say our current system is perfect, but rather that any such system is arbitrary, and will eventually become conventionalized either way without active, persistent intervention.
*Used here in the lay sense, not the linguistic sense. I’ve added this later since the conversation below turned to the difference between phonetics and phonology, and my use of “phonetic” in this comment could be seen as confusing in that context.
Someone read Manufacturing Consent
I honestly don’t either - it’s probably just as arbitrary and socialized as boob size preferences. Maybe someone here with a background in sociology or anthropology can shed some light?