How should we relate to language?

Comments

• SandmanXC@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I know this is off topic but I’m close to finishing the book Snow Crash where this is a central theme. As someone who thinks about this from time to time it was really fun.

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• neidu3@sh.itjust.works ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I don’t have an snwer for you, I just came here to ask: E du vegaværing?

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  • vegafjord@slrpnk.net ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Nei, desverre:(

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• jbrains@sh.itjust.works ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I strive for clarity in everyday communication, but reserve the right to play when ambiguity is easily tolerable. I try to make life easier for second-language speakers in English and I appreciate it when they do the same in their language.

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• Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  perspectives.americananthro.org/…/Language.pdf

  You might be interested in this, a chapter of an open textbook put out by the American Anthropological Society, that’s about language and culture.

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  • vegafjord@slrpnk.net ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I’ll look into it:)

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• DarkCloud@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Isn’t it more the medium is the message type shit? Eventually language goes from expression to communication to conveying experience and ergo the language you choose becomes part of the experience, and it’s all going to loop back around.

  That’s why we program, right? Story telling, art, civilization, building a world with unique cracks in your universe until technology facilitates the creation of a universe. A Von Neumann machine. Forgetting whilst experiencing.

  This is it’s self a product of knowledge, the more you have the less you see (your experience becomes collecting expressions). It’s Heisenbergs Uncertainty principle.

  Eventually you just see yourself experiencing and signals are all that matter… Signals that go beyond language.

  The point of language is to transcend it.

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• vegafjord@slrpnk.net ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  A word carries a cultural reference. A society has a relationship towards different cultures and the cultural meaning are summened through the use of words. Water has a different cultural meaning in chinese languages compared to outside. Freedom has a different cultural meaning in america compared to outside. Målreising (tongue lift) has a different cultural meaning in norway compared to outside.

  Languages bombards us with cultural meanings every day which shapes our deed in small and large ways. They have trained our mind in what information is important and what information is not important. We are mostly cognitively unconcious about what we do throughout the day. (look into Lakoff Philosophy in the flesh)

  For this reason I am of the conviction that we should strive to know how we are influenced, how the words shapes us and impact our cognitive unconcious. I think we can best do this through ensuring that words are easy to understand, easy to construct, easy to teach, have strong images. By doing this languages becomes more accessible.

  I often view my own personal language as a growing birch, in some regards. It grows in many directions. As I learn, branches grows, splits and gains leaves. When I juggle, there are many different ways I can grow upon already existing abilities. Taking a trick, I can make it more advanced, and if completed, it would be like a new branch growing from the previous trick.

  By improving the flexibility of the language, we can envision growth more easily.

  Norwegian

  In Norway this question is much more prominent because we have two official written languages both with big fandoms. Book-norwegian and new-norwegian. These represents two different philosophies.

  Book-norwegian was made on the basis of collecting how people spoke norwegian in the 1800’s (strongly influenced by danish) whereas new-norwegian was made by a linguist who wanted norwegian to be as removed from danish as possible.

  From this we can characterize book-norwegian as pragmatist, whereas new-norwegian is purist.

  We also have sam-norwegian which wants to mesh these two languages into one creating a single united language. I think this is absurd because the underlying philosophies does not blend.

  My position in norwegian

  The flaw with the pragmatic approach to language is that it makes whatever words comes in accepted, regardless of how well or poorly they mesh with the existing language. A word like “contraversial”, or “cohort” can enter the norwegian language even though the vast majority can’t speak latin. We are told their meanings instead of understanding their meanings.

  Those who embrace new norwegian often say that it is a more poetic language, and I believe this is because it is easier to construct words when you have to operate with a single language instead of five. You don’t have to understand german, latin, french, danish and norwegian to construct words. The phonology is also more consistent easing rythm. It becomes easier to see how you can manipulate sentences.

  Målreising

  In norwegian we have what we call målreising which means we try to improve the language.

  Esperanto

  Yes, I have learned it.

  What can we learn from it?

  Esperanto has great resources for learning and is constructed for ease of learning. It’s easy to concatinate to create new words. By looking at a word, you can easily understand what it means even if you have never heard it before and you know how to pronounce the words immidiately.

  World language

  World languages is popular. They make it easy to travel long distances and still be understood, it makes it possible for a whole world to react to injustice on the other side of Gaja.

  World languages has a lot of good things going for them.

  But world languages also means that it becomes easier for might to influence the entire world through soft might. It makes the machine more efficient. Makes the cogs turn around faster. But whereas some would think of this as good… I view the increased efficiency as a way of increasing the burden upon a weakened Gaja.

  There should be languages for coordination, but the size of world languages has given a monsterous hegemony for the mighty.

  lokening: We should give less attention for world languages and more attention for geographically close languages.

  Conclusion

  Now this is a mess. Like a tree that grows in a thousand directions, I don’t really know how to entangle them back to a simple conclusion, and I feel like I’ve spent much more time on this than what I had planned, so I’ll have to stop here and hope there was some insight and not too confusing.

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