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antonim

@ antonim @lemmy.world

Posts
5
Comments
66
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • The left is missing out on AI

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  • Is this some sort of rage/engagement bait? Lol

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  • I'm a bit late with this reply, but oh well... It seems to me that you equate your acquaintance's position with actual linguistic descriptivism. But no, what he and you show is just different preferences and/or normative relationships towards language. Descriptivism (as in, the position that should be taken by a serious linguist) absolutely does not want to "flatten" language, it does not take a normative position, though it can/should criticise normative positions that are unavoidably based on unscientific notions. Those can include preference for "simple" language. Dictionaries don't follow what's going on at TikTok, so that's just a non-issue.

    Like, imagine a Christian talking with an atheist, and calling the atheist a Satanist. This is the same sort of mistake.

    You are free to enjoy books with one sort of vocabulary, he's free to enjoy books with an another sort of vocabulary. This is more of a matter of aesthetics, which we could also discuss, but I'd prefer to leave that aside or we'll have to write even further walls of text.

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  • Oxen is historically a 100% English plural, just like child-children, it wasn't loaned. (I should check, but I'm pretty sure it's the same -en as in German plurals: das Auge, die Augen.)

    Some of these Latin plurals can survive for technical terminology. But it's pretty much only Latin ones, due to the historical prestige. Nobody talks of Soviet apparatchiki, it's apparatchiks.

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  • The whole idea of etymology is that you can figure out what a word means from its roots.

    That was the idea in ancient Greece when the name of the endavour/field was created (etymon = "true"). In the 19th century when linguistics became a serious science it was effectively becoming abandoned, and quite clearly criticised by 20th century linguists. Words' meanings and forms shift inevitably, they've always been shifting, and trying to pick one single stage of this process as the right one is basically like saying that the earth is flat because from any individual vantage point it looks flat to you.

    If you throw all that out, you give up the scaffolding that makes words make any sense.

    No, you don't. 99% of people don't know the etymology of 99% of the words they use. Not even linguists have definitive answers for the etymology of words such as 'boy' and 'dog'. Words' meanings are actually established by usage, by tradition as it's handed down to us, with some leeway in how we accept and modify the tradition. (These mechanisms of language change are many and affect various levels of language.) Note that cultures that don't have scientific etymology still have perfectly functional languages.

    It seems like the argument for descriptivism is “let’s not be elitist when people become less competent with the rules of a language”

    That's one of the arguments, but as you can see I don't think it's crucial.

    I suspect there is also a body of professional linguists who oppose your point for the same reasons.

    There are some professional linguists who are active as prescriptivists. Their number varies depending on the country, in Anglophone countries their number is miniscule. In countries with a more pronounced prescriptivist tradition (as in mine, I'm from Croatia) their number declines through time as academia accepts and integrates modern linguistic theories, and the remaining prescriptivists' positions soften. And I can't help but notice that many of the current prescriptivists are shoddy linguists and ideologically motivated (elitists, conservatives).

    The prescriptivists are actually quite thin on the justifications for their approach. They won't theoretically or empirically defend prescriptivism, arguments for it amount to vague and unscientific claims of a need for order and clarity in language (which exist regardless of prescriptivist intervention), and such stuff. But even they usually don't dare to go so far as to claim etymology is the source of correct meanings, because they know that holding such a position would immediately lead into absurdity and extremism. Leaf through an etymological dictionary and try to stick to the oldest meaning described there. You'll quickly realise that the source of correct meanings can't be the words and forms from 500, 1000, or 4000 years ago. In fact, I've seen prescriptivists attack usage that's been around for centuries, or demand people follow semantic distinctions between words or constructions that never existed at all.

    A book recommendation, if you're interested: L. Bauer and P. Trudgill, Language Myths.

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  • Putting aside the technicalities (it is not language that is prescriptive or descriptive, but linguistics), that's a widespread position among perfectly literate people, including professional linguists. Nothing to do with the number of "likes".

  • Trump slammed as "a wolf in sheep clothing" (IMHO, the "sheep clothing" looks pretty wolfy)

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  • It was a wolf who promised to the sheeps he'll eat all the cows so the sheep will have more grass for themselves.

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  • A Redditor Criticized ICE. Trump Is Trying to Unmask Them by Dragging the Company to a Secret Grand Jury.

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  • Let me guess, it's an AI-generated subpoena?

  • LibreOffice Drama: The Document Foundation Removes Collabora Developers in One Sweep

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  • I don't know about the features, the thing that makes me wary is that Collabora is a private company, unlike TDF which is non-profit.

  • LibreOffice Drama: The Document Foundation Removes Collabora Developers in One Sweep

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  • Well if we're looking at a "history repeats itself" event, I still hope it won't be Collabora replacing LO as the default FOSS office suite.

  • LibreOffice Drama: The Document Foundation Removes Collabora Developers in One Sweep

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  • LO works fine, it won't suddenly stop because of this. But it may gradually decline, that's to be seen... I'll stick with LO for now.

  • Pupils in England are losing their thinking skills because of AI— Two-thirds of secondary school teachers report a decline in core abilities such as writing and problem-solving

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  • Two thirds of secondary teachers (66 per cent) agree that pupils’ critical thinking has declined due to AI usage.

    AI use among teachers is now widespread and growing. Three quarters (76 per cent) are now using AI tools for day-to-day work,

    hmmm 🤔

  • What if you kept digging downward?

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  • Is it just me or is the answer to most of these recent videos simply 'you'd die'?

  • Wikipedia has banned AI-generated text, with two exceptions

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  • Spell- and grammar-checking is useless anyway. If you don't have at least one word underlined with red in every sentence, you're not writing anything intellectually serious. 🧐

  • Wikipedia has banned AI-generated text, with two exceptions

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  • How do you win an award from editing Wikipedia?

  • What is a gender neutral honorific for non-binary folk?

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  • But that won't fuel the internet discourse™!

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  • Khan made lots of kids tho. This one did it just for the love of the game.

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    TIL the USSR re-criminalised homosexuality

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  • You are in some deep seated denial if you don’t think homosexuals express affection through kissing.

    I expected more than defaulting to disingenuity. Straight men kissing is not the same as gay men kissing. Implying that Soviet politicians expressed their homosexual desires by kissing is an insulting level of trivialising homosexuality.

    Yeah, I’m sorry if the size and depth of the document scared you off.

    And - more disingenuity, along with childish pretentiousness. The text doesn't say anything specific in support of your claims. The "depth" required to prove LGBT culture existed in USSR is miniscule, the general methodological considerations that the PDF discusses are irrelevant here.

    I’m arguing the homosexual urge is strong and universal. Russia is no exception. And that, when the political moment allows for it, the expressions of queer love flourish.

    I don't remember anyone claiming otherwise. What was being discussed was how the state deals with that urge and, implied, how we evaluate states with regards to how they dealt with it.

    Liberals want to deny that this golden age of free love and open queer expression occurred, because it flies in the face of their orthodoxy. But it happened repeatedly over the history of the USSR. Soviet peoples openly expressed their queer love and accepted the queer love of their neighbors. Soviet governments bent in the face of it, even as the reactionaries fought against it.

    This is pure fantasy. You are free to provide actual documentation from that age and prove me wrong - not meta-methodological pontificating of academics but actual traces of that time period from USSR - but as I've studied Russian and had some interest in their culture, as well as spent some time in Russian online queer spaces, all I've seen is historical silence or erasure, even during the supposed "golden age". I would be sincerely glad to be proven otherwise, I'd be glad to see that LGBT history hasn't been as uniformly bleak as it seems to me now.

    You don’t need perfect liberal conditions to enjoy a queer society.

    Maybe. The point is simply that USSR was very far from a queer(-positive) society either way, with a possible window of greater freedom for a short while that doesn't seem to have left any serious traces in practice.

    Hell, quite a bit of modern western history suggests liberalism is as much a threat to queer expression as any socialist government.

    And - standard defaulting to "liberal societies are equally bad tho!". Right after desperately trying to prove socialism created a queer "golden age", as if you don't believe your own claims about it yourself.

    Russia and the surrounding states are filled with these people and will continue to be filled with these people, whether you choose to acknowledge them or not.

    This has nothing to do with the topic. We're talking about USSR's sexual politics, not current LGBT activism in Russia.