#it's a living shifting beast and millions are actively redirecting its flow every second | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

thevegetablewhichnoonedaresname · 19 days ago

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sorry. I just saw another video with some guy being "hurr durr Japanese has two syllabaries plus kanji so why don't they just ditch kanji and one of the syllabaries and start putting spaces between the words" idk man why does English retain spelling patterns from a bajillion different languages instead of reforming spelling so that everything looks the way it sounds. that stuff fossilizes language history that no one's thinking about otherwise, it's really hard to convince a whole country or multiple countries full of literate people to change everything about the way they read and write, and, yeah, it does carry semantic value that you're underestimating the importance of as well. shut up. I don't ever want to hear about this again

#pickle pontificates #sorry. if your platform is even slightly educational/fun fact adjacent I don't ever want to hear this again about any language ever #like if you're learning and frustrated that's one thing but if you're trying to convey info don't do it through the lens of #''isn't this weird and stupid''#no. no it isn't. not to an extent that any other language isn't at least #not like I think japanese is in any particular danger because of these dudes the rhetoric just sucks #and you see people applying it to languages/cultures that ARE undervalued too *cough*welsh*cough*#language #gonna clarify more now that it's not 4AM while I'm trying to get ready for an appointment:#this guy wasn't the worst version of this take I've ever seen #like he was sorta half joking #the issue is that a lot of people tend to look at complexities in language from the perspective of a learner and say ''that's not logical''#''that's hard. why would they do it like that''#and the answer is ALWAYS because language was not crafted in a laboratory for maximum semantic efficiency #it's cobbled together out of history and blood and violence and love and emotion and a desire be understood #billions of people making tiny contributions over thousands of years #it's a living shifting beast and millions are actively redirecting its flow every second #of COURSE it's not perfectly logical #but if you can just look at those seeming inconsistencies for more than a second and consider where they came from #slowly it becomes more and more logical #you realize that you're not tracing a simple mathematical equivalency where x=y #you're picking up a story thousands of years in and it's full of references to previous plot points

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