The word lox was one of the clues that eventually led linguists to discover who the Proto-Indo-Europeans were, and where they lived.Photograph by Helen Cook / Flickr One of my favorite words is lox,” says Gregory Guy, a professor of linguistics at New York University. There is hardly a more quintessential New York food than […]
Literally never went to school or learned how to read or write.
You’re describing every language for the overwhelming majority of the last 150,000+ years. English is not unique in that.
Which is why it’s one of the hardest languages to learn
It’s not. English has a lot of irregularity to remember, but not the most. How difficult you find a language depends on your native language. English lacks things like elaborate case structures or grammatical gender which can be hard unless your native language has something similar. The ‘th’ sound is rare, but there are no clicks or tones. SVO is not the most common word order, but it’s not the rarest.
there wasn’t even a noble population who were helping rules be set logically, it’s a slang language.
Huh? That’s not how having a nobility works. Or what slang is. The rich aren’t more logical, and they aren’t concerned with making language easier. If anything nobles want more arcane language that takes longer to learn to better differentiate themselves from those with less free time.
It sounds like you’re thinking of the prescriptive grammar movement where from the 1700s or so rich English speakers decided if it’s not possible in Latin then it’s uncouth in English, and started making up nonsense rules like no split infinitives or ending sentences with a preposition. They couched it in terms of being logical and correct but it was in reality a novel way of marking social class. And ~700 years after the English peasant/Norman aristocrat divide.
Name a single language that didn’t have an aristocracy that knew how to read and write and learned formalized Grammer [sic] for the majority of that langauges [sic] history.
You do realize more than half of the world’s ~7,000 languages still have no writing system, right?
Name a single language that didn’t have an aristocracy that knew how to read and write and learned formalized Grammer for the majority of that languages history.
😂 I’m going to be generous and assume you’re just trolling now and don’t seriously believe this.
Which is why it’s one of the hardest languages to learn, there wasn’t even a noble population who were helping rules be set logically, it’s a slang language.
Which languages had nobles changing the rules of the language to be logical, and beat the peasantry until they repeated their absurd shibboleths?
Proscriptivists have existed in many languages, English included. They’ve basically always been tilting at windmills.
Governments tend to be most effective at killing languages wholesale, rather than systemically changing grammar. And it’s something that’s been far more effective in the past couple hundred years as part of nation- building projects. E.g. the efforts of France, Italy and Spain to squash minority languages like Occitan, Galician or Neapolitan.
Ah, yes, that’s why the French still speak perfect Latin.
Yes, old grammar textbooks have been an incredibly important resource for linguists, particularly for reconstructing ancient pronunciations. They’re useful for teaching historians etc. Old French or whatever.
But we generally haven’t been terribly successful at beating students into using obsolete grammar rules and to stop using modern grammatical innovations.
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You’re describing every language for the overwhelming majority of the last 150,000+ years. English is not unique in that.
It’s not. English has a lot of irregularity to remember, but not the most. How difficult you find a language depends on your native language. English lacks things like elaborate case structures or grammatical gender which can be hard unless your native language has something similar. The ‘th’ sound is rare, but there are no clicks or tones. SVO is not the most common word order, but it’s not the rarest.
Huh? That’s not how having a nobility works. Or what slang is. The rich aren’t more logical, and they aren’t concerned with making language easier. If anything nobles want more arcane language that takes longer to learn to better differentiate themselves from those with less free time.
It sounds like you’re thinking of the prescriptive grammar movement where from the 1700s or so rich English speakers decided if it’s not possible in Latin then it’s uncouth in English, and started making up nonsense rules like no split infinitives or ending sentences with a preposition. They couched it in terms of being logical and correct but it was in reality a novel way of marking social class. And ~700 years after the English peasant/Norman aristocrat divide.
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You do realize more than half of the world’s ~7,000 languages still have no writing system, right?
😂 I’m going to be generous and assume you’re just trolling now and don’t seriously believe this.
Removed by mod
Which languages had nobles changing the rules of the language to be logical, and beat the peasantry until they repeated their absurd shibboleths?
Proscriptivists have existed in many languages, English included. They’ve basically always been tilting at windmills.
Governments tend to be most effective at killing languages wholesale, rather than systemically changing grammar. And it’s something that’s been far more effective in the past couple hundred years as part of nation- building projects. E.g. the efforts of France, Italy and Spain to squash minority languages like Occitan, Galician or Neapolitan.
Removed by mod
Ah, yes, that’s why the French still speak perfect Latin.
Yes, old grammar textbooks have been an incredibly important resource for linguists, particularly for reconstructing ancient pronunciations. They’re useful for teaching historians etc. Old French or whatever.
But we generally haven’t been terribly successful at beating students into using obsolete grammar rules and to stop using modern grammatical innovations.