#is the categorisation of sounds of speech as having certain inherent qualities truly objective—or do they happen to align with certain
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believe it or not but assigning morality to phones/phonemes isn’t the haha quirky little joke you think it is!
#like that has uh. a History!#elli rambles#there are definitely some Posts in the linguistics tag sometimes.#it definitely isn’t the most egregious example I’ve seen/heard and the op probably didn’t mean anything by it but. hm!#haha funny alignment chart. now quick tell me what you think about foreign languages. or the sapir-whorf hypothesis perhaps.#ok to take off my Silly Mask for a moment: what I’m getting at with those understatements is that assigning morality/any qualities really to#language has a bigoted—& more specifically: usually racist—history. language has often been used as a tool & justification for oppression.#take a look at the languages currently & historically deemed ‘pretty’ or ‘civilised’. compare that with the ones deemed ‘ugly’ or ‘barbaric’#who speaks them? exactly which features make them ‘worthy’ of those adjectives? is it only phonetics? if so: in what way exactly?#is the categorisation of sounds of speech as having certain inherent qualities truly objective—or do they happen to align with certain#cultural or personal biases? what purpose does this categorisation serve?#are a people deemed ‘barbaric’ because the language they speak is inherently & objectively barbaric—or is it perhaps the other way around?#could this type of view of a language possibly be used to justify the subjugation of its speakers under the guise of ‘civilising’ them?#Perhaps?#which is obviously not to say phonetic features are the only ones used to assign certain qualities to languages! but it was what the post#I’m referencing was about so#anyway sorry I went off on a tangent. I just feel quite strongly about this#languageposting
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