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    • Showing only topics with the tag "language". Back to normal view

    2. How do you go about learning a new language?

      ~humanities.languages Ask (advice)
      I've been playing with the idea that I might try to learn a second language. I have sparse memories of my great grandparents and grandparents speaking their native language, but it didn't get...

      I've been playing with the idea that I might try to learn a second language. I have sparse memories of my great grandparents and grandparents speaking their native language, but it didn't get passed down beyond them.

      In my daily life I have no immediate need to communicate outside of English, but I think it would be more than interesting anyway. I've played around with Duolingo and while I can see what it's doing (very early stages), I struggle to feel it will be useful for long.

      What are the methods that folks have used to learn a new language? Is there a path that is "best" or "easiest"? As an old, I'm used to the traditional method of learning with a teacher, but I don't know how to find one locally for the language I'm interested in (modern Greek).

      Any advice is very welcome, thanks!

      P.S. I hope this lands in the right section, I wasn't sure if I should post it here or in Hobbies.

      44 votes

    4. Peeves, opinions, and hot takes about style

      ~humanities.languages Ask
      The recent topic on grammar errors that actually matter got me interested in all of your opinions about style. Working in academia, I have developed a surprising number of strong opinions about...

      The recent topic on grammar errors that actually matter got me interested in all of your opinions about style. Working in academia, I have developed a surprising number of strong opinions about style and formatting over the years. I'm curious to hear what you all care about. I am also curious to see if I can be persuaded to cool down some of my own hot takes based on your responses. I'll share a few to get us started.

      1. For the love of all that is holy, do not put a footnote in a title or in an abstract.
      2. Similarly, do not put a citation in a title or an abstract!
      3. An abstract should be... an abstract, not your life story or even a summary of the paper. It most certainly should not develop and defend arguments.
      4. Does a published manuscript really need to be double spaced?
      5. I'm in the punctuation-inside-quotations camp, but I am open to the alternative. I am somewhat of a weirdo in believing that individual authors should be free to use either style (so long as they remain consistent in their usage).
      6. Bibliographies should prioritize the language of the original source; meaning, it is ridiculous to transliterate the titles of non-Latin works in a bibliography. What are you going to do with that information? If you don't know that language, then it is utterly meaningless, and even more so because you can't even do anything with that transliterated text. Plus, good luck getting a standard transliteration out of anyone. All this does is just obscure the fact that these sources were cited, at least as far as indexers are concerned. It would make more sense to just include translated titles next to the original, but eliminating the non-Latin text altogether is so absurd (looking at you APA).
      7. On a similar note, foreign words should not be italicized or emphasized any other way just because they appear in a text. All this does is fill up the text with needless emphasis that distracts from the things you do mean to emphasize.

      Okay, I will stop here before I cross the threshold where I won't be able to get anymore work done today! :b

      24 votes

    5. Grammar errors that actually matter, or: the thread where we all become prescriptivists

      ~humanities.languages Ask
      This subject is a dead horse on most social media platforms (I'm sure there are dozens if not hundreds of similar threads on /r/askreddit alone, for one), but I didn't find a thread about it...

      This subject is a dead horse on most social media platforms (I'm sure there are dozens if not hundreds of similar threads on /r/askreddit alone, for one), but I didn't find a thread about it specifically on Tildes from a cursory search (though I did find more specific threads about some aspects of it like this one as well as the broader prescriptivism vs descriptivism subject here and even the mirror opposite of what this thread is about, that is deliberately using non-standard language in a constructive manner) and I think that it might spark worthwhile discussion.

      By and large, I agree that language should be seen from a descriptive point of view, meaning a language's rules are defined by how people speak it, not the other way around. As the need to communicate evolves, so does any given living language and a rigidly enforced ruleset would get in the way of this process. By opposition, the prescriptive approach views a language's rules as defining a "correct" way (making any other way incorrect) of speaking the language to be enforced accordingly. Following either approach to its respective logical extreme would be a dead-end but I do think the most reasonably balanced way to approach this tends a lot more toward descriptivism than prescriptivism.

      While agreed-upon rules are still definitely useful to establish a language's identity and defining a standard helps both with learning the language and structuring how the language should evolve (and when learning it's probably best to operate by the book at first, literally or otherwise, until you're familiar with the language enough to reliably tell when bending the rules is advantageous), getting yourself understood is much more important than strictly "following the rules", and that's before considering the cases where the rules themselves are ambiguous, or their validity is a matter of debate, which itself brings up the much more controversial issue of what constitutes an authoritative source for a language's grammar in the first place. In practice, even if there is a consensus on something being a grammar error, most are benign enough to not risk the meaning of the sentence being misinterpreted anyway. And of course, there's the issue of people ostensibly wanting to be helpful using "correcting someone's grammar" as an excuse for gatekeeping, toxic behavior or derailing conversations into a pointless grammar debate.

      For example, while my latent pedantry constantly incites nitpicking on those smaller mistakes, it's obvious that someone using "Your welcome" instead of you're is acknowledging gratitude and no one would argue in good faith that this could be misinterpreted as referring to an abstract hospitality belonging to the person they're addressing. Similarly, using "irregardless" (which presumably arose as a contraction of irrespective and regardless) might be argued as meaning the opposite of "regardless" since ir- is a negation prefix, making using that word a mistake due to the ambiguity. In practice, interpreting it that way in any sentence where the word actually appears would be very unintuitive so the ambiguity doesn't actually manifest... Though the argument I see much more often against its use is that irregardless is "a made-up word" and therefore incorrect (as opposed to all the real words which are, what, woven into the very fabric of the universe?), which is silly. I personally don't use this word, but I wouldn't bat an eye if I saw it becoming normalized either.

      That being said, I believe there is such a thing as incorrect use of language that actually hampers communication and therefore should be discouraged, some of which I'll give examples below. I... got wildly carried away while writing it so I made it an optional collapsible box.

      Warning: long

      Using "literally" to mean "figuratively"

      Obligatory relevant xkcd. While I understand the argument of validating this use as a natural extension of using exaggeration for emphasis (and it's intuitive enough that I sometimes catch myself doing it), I do think the words that are supposed to mean "I am not exaggerating, using a metaphor or joking, I mean this in exactly the way I worded it" should be exempt from this. Language history is no stranger to words shifting their meaning until they're the opposite of their former meaning, and there are plenty of situations where words simultaneously have opposite meanings (in fact, enough of them that a term exists for this which has its own Wikipedia article) where I don't think it's much of an issue, but I do think this matters here, especially since this is happening to many similar words used for that purpose (such as "actually" and "genuinely"), not just "literally". Unambiguously clarifying that the meaning of your statement isn't figurative is something important enough that the words for it shouldn't have their meaning diluted IMHO.

      bytes vs bits

      More of a matter of technical standardization than pure linguistics, but two separate albeit related issues are happening here. First, a "bit" here is a unit of digital data, being either 0 or 1, whereas a "byte" is another unit usually made of eight bits. While you can define bytes following a different amount as some older and specialized machines do, in practice there is no ambiguity with 8 being the accepted norm and other words (including the word "word" itself, funnily enough) being available should the distinction matter. The bit/byte distinction is commonly understood and usually not a matter of confusion... until you start bringing up shortened unit names and disingenuous marketing. Despite the unit that the average user is most familiar with being the byte, shortened to an uppercase B as a unit symbol, while bits are in turn shortened to a lowercase b, unscrupulous advertisers will often take advantage of the fact bits are a lesser known unit while using almost the exact same symbol to refer to, say, network speeds for a broadband plan they're trying to sell using bits, not bytes, allowing them to sneak in numbers (in bits) eight times bigger than the values (in bytes) the customer would expect in the unit they are more accustomed to.

      Using SI prefixes in place of equivalent binary prefixes

      The second part (and with it another relevant xkcd) is the distinction between decimal SI prefixes and the IEC binary prefixes, or lack thereof in common usage. For context, a convenient coincidence for computer science is that the value of 1000x and 210x (equal to 1024x) are similar enough for a low enough value of x to map binary prefixes according to the usual SI metric prefixes (so while 1kg is a kilogram equaling 1000 grams, 1KiB is one kibibyte equaling 1024 bytes, 1MiB is a mebibyte equaling 1024 kibibytes, and so on) and using them to refer to data sizes, which is a lot more convenient to deal with when everything related to computing is binary rather than decimal. This also led before the adoption of those binary prefixes to the practice of "incorrectly" using the SI decimal prefixes' names and symbols when referring to binary data sizes. I'm perfectly fine with this in informal contexts precisely because it's a convenient shortcut and the inaccuracy usually doesn't matter, but this also means a company can pretend, say, a storage device they're selling has a higher capacity than it really does by mixing up the units to their advantage. Worse, a company that does want to convey the capacity of their devices to the user in good faith has another issue: MacOS defaults to computing sizes displayed to the user using the decimal prefixes (1MB = 1000kB = 1 million bytes), while Linux generally defaults to the binary sizes (1MiB = 1024KiB = 10242 = 1048576 bytes).

      In which I manage to blame Microsoft for a grammar error

      Not much of an issue if you stick to the correct units, but given which OS I pointedly didn't mention yet, you probably realized where this is going. Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, elected to show data sizes on Windows that, while computed according to binary sizes, are displayed using the decimal prefixes, leading to 1"MB" = 1024 "KB" = 1048576 bytes, but displayed in units that imply it should be 1000000 bytes. This is a holdover from the older practice of using the metric SI prefixes' names as binary prefixes when specifically referring to bytes I mentioned above, which is nowadays discouraged in favor of the international standard for binary prefixes established back in 1999... but clearly Microsoft didn't get the memo. Is it a minor problem in the grand scheme of things? Absolutely, but I consider this negligent handling of a pretty fundamental question where a clear consensus has been established given that this is coming from the company that publishes the consumer OS running on the overwhelming majority of personal computers. As someone who is familiar with computing, I understand why the mental shortcut makes sense. As a consumer, if I buy a kilogram of something, I expect to receive as close to a thousand grams as the manufacturing process reasonably allows, not consistently end up with 976.5625 grams instead of the advertised kilogram. In any other context, "it's more convenient to pretend we count in base 10 but we're actually counting in base 2 and not properly converting the numbers back, usually to the detriment of the customer" would be seen as absurd, but the IT industry apparently got away with it. By not following the internationally standardized terms in their own OS, Microsoft is perpetuating this issue which is doing us a disservice... and I'll move on to the next example before this becomes yet another computing rant in what's supposed to be part of a thread about language, and not even the programming kind.

      I could/n't care less

      I'm starting to see a pattern here. Another case of "saying something but actually meaning the opposite" which I think is important to be mindful of. Granted, "I couldn't care less" is a common enough stock phrase that omitting the negation usually is recognized as such and not interpreted to mean the opposite, and there are other (and probably more intuitive) ways to convey the literal meaning of "I could care less", but given that there are generally a whole lot fewer things people care about (and therefore occasions to state it) than the alternative, I think it matters more to keep a way to mean that something does actually matter to you intact than expanding the way people can say that they don't care about something by including the exact opposite. I've also seen this used in yet another way to refer something they care about to at least some degree, but still little (with the reasoning that feeling the need to state explicitly that you are able to care less implicitly states that you cared very little in the first place) which is very similar to the meaning of "I couldn't care less" but still has makes an important distinction that I think should be preserved.

      Wrong homophones (or otherwise similarly sounding words) when the correct one is not obvious

      Mistakes derived from those are usually not an issue since it's very easy to tell which is the correct one... until it's not. For example, "brake" vs "break" when talking about cars, "ordinance" vs "ordnance" when the topic intersects bureaucracy and the military, and "raise" vs "raze" might lead to very unfortunate misunderstandings in construction. More generally, "hear" vs "here" can quickly make the meaning of a sentence incomprehensible especially if the mixup happens in a sentence where both are used, and "than" vs "then" can radically change the meaning of the sentence. Similar sounding words can have pretty significant differences without mixing them up being necessarily obvious, such as amuse/bemuse, persecute/prosecute or prescribe/proscribe. Ironically, the common mixups that people tend to find the most annoying to see (e.g their/they're/there, to/two/too, loose/lose, affect/effect, should or could of instead of should or could have, definitely/defiantly) aren't the ones that are likely to actually introduce ambiguity (I would suspect bad faith from anyone claiming a mixup between "angel" and "angle" is actually ambiguous, with one notable exception), or, if they do, not in a way that would radically warp the sentence's meaning (inflict/afflict is a common one and the two words are similar enough that it would be difficult to notice if the "wrong" one was used... but that goes both ways: they're so similar such a mixup would most likely be of little consequence to the overall meaning)

      Leaving unclear links between clauses

      While the above is mostly about word (mis-)use, another big category of mistakes that gives me a headache is made up of sentences where the ambiguity comes from the structure of the sentence itself. I would include Garden-path sentences and certain cases of dangling/misplaced modifiers in this category (though not all of them as context is often enough to clear up any possible confusion). For the former, news article titles that are too clever for their own good by trying to fit as much information in as few words as possible are notable offenders. I've actually given up trying to understand a news headline for this reason at least once. For the latter, there are already many examples out there of leveraging it for comedy, so I'll use the following as a more straightforward example: in the sentence "I need to invite my best friend, the CEO and the mayor", it is unclear whether I'm referring to a single person that is my best friend, the CEO and the mayor at the same time, two people one of which is both my best friend and the CEO and the second person is the mayor, or three different people. Ambiguities like these are something I consider important to be mindful of because they can quickly result in the meaning you intended to convey being completely warped.

      Which turns of phrase would you consider to be categorically incorrect? Did I commit one in this very post? If you chose to read through the content of the collapsible box above, do you disagree with some of my examples (or the entire premise of the question in the first place)? While I'm assuming English as the default for my own answer, feel free to talk about any other language you might know (ideally with context for non-speakers of the language).

      Also, since I mentioned it in the post, another optional subject: which mistakes that people seem to care a lot about (and sometimes not even mistakes, given that the same treatment is occasionally given to perfectly correct turns of phrase due to misconceptions about grammar rules) do you think aren't actually important at all?

      38 votes

    15. English grammar book recommendations?

      ~humanities.languages Ask (recommendations)
      Hi fellow Tilder Staters, I write professionally for my job. I've picked up plenty of tips, tricks, and strategies from mentors and managers over the years. I also have an English degree focused...

      Hi fellow Tilder Staters,

      I write professionally for my job. I've picked up plenty of tips, tricks, and strategies from mentors and managers over the years.

      I also have an English degree focused in literature.

      But I've never formally studied grammar or linguistics.

      Does anyone have a textbook or theory book that they could recommend in this space? I've tried to look around a bit but nothing has caught my eye, and the subject is dry enough that I don't have the time or energy to invest in one of the boring options.

      9 votes

    20. The return of non-PC language in the US mainstream

      ~talk Ask
      I don't know how appropriate this topic will be or how uncomfortable some users will be addressing it. But I noticed a switch online in the usage of previously determined slurs. When I was a child...

      I don't know how appropriate this topic will be or how uncomfortable some users will be addressing it. But I noticed a switch online in the usage of previously determined slurs.

      When I was a child in the '00s, it was pretty common for people to say the "r-word" as well as refer to things as "gay" whenever they meant stupid or bad. I remember ad campaigns to stop the latter from occurring (one commercial featuring Hillary Duff and another featuring Wanda Sykes). But both of those things went away as we got deeper into the 2010s.

      The Obama and, especially, the Trump years were marked by increased progressive language. I do think the turn was in 2016 when using these terms became widely unacceptable. Even two years earlier the hit song Fancy by Iggy Azalea featuring Charli XCX contained the lyric: "That my flow r***** each beat dear, departed."

      I think a lot of the hyper-political correctness of 2016 and onwards was a response to the Trump presidency. I think people on the progressive left felt the need to be hyper-vigilant about that. Once the Biden administration happened these rigid beliefs began to relax.

      I'll use a few examples of this shift involving a network TV show, to take this conversation into a more concrete real world. Saturday Night Live.

      Shane Gillis, a very non politically correct comedian was hired as part of the cast of SNL in 2019. Lorne Michaels hired him to appeal to a more conservative crowd or to at least not be so catering to its liberal demographic. Gillis, who is largely not a conservative, was caught in a scandal following his casting news. Clips from his podcast surfaced of him making fun of Asians and mocking their accents. Gillis was shortly fired.

      Fast forward to this year: Shane Gillis hosts SNL. Not only that, in his opening monologue he says the r-word.

      Another SNL adjacent example. Matt Healy, lead singer of the 1975, appeared on The Adam Friedland Show podcast. The podcast, originally called Cumtown, is known for its non-PC humor. Healy participated in jokes making fun of Ice Spice and laughed at the host's more racy humor. Scandal surrounded Healy, who was dating Swift at the time, and he was essentially "canceled." Except, he was immediately the musical guest on SNL not long after the scandal (they were the musical spot for Jenna Ortega's episode). If this was 2019, The 1975 likely would not have been invited to be the musical guests, and/or the host of the episode (in this case Ortega) would have been pressured by her PR team to make some sort of post disavowing their inclusion. This didn't happen. In fact this year Jenna Ortega criticized political correctness herself

      The last SNL example I wanted to give was in Ariana Grande's recent episode a joke was included where Grande calls someone a pathetic little gay guy, followed by her saying "I meant gay as in stupid and bad" which was very well received on all corners of the internet.

      So what happened here? My perception might be warped since in late 2022 I began using the subreddits r/redscarepod and r/theadamfriedlandshow where this type of humor and the usage of these terms was already normal. So it was a little odd to me when these began gaining steam in the outside world.

      If it really was just a response to Biden's presidency I feel like we would now be returning to the hyper-political correctness of the 2010s during Trump's administration. But that doesn't seem to be happening.

      Maybe political correctness fell out of style, and that will be the case for another five to ten years when it becomes fashionable again.

      43 votes

    29. Verbalize - text editor with writing assistance for Brazilian Portuguese

      ~tech Text 248 words
      I believe this is a interesting issue to post it here because it's very difficult to get writing tools outside the English language. That's exactly why I ended up starting this project. If it's...

      I believe this is a interesting issue to post it here because it's very difficult to get writing tools outside the English language. That's exactly why I ended up starting this project. If it's not allowed, I apologise in advance.

      I'm a linguist and technical writer (tech writer, dev writer, documenter, technical editor, etc.) and I've always used Hemingway for my English writing. The problem was that I'd never found a text editor capable of suggesting possible improvements to a text in Brazilian Portuguese.

      Years passed, and this week I had time to create a fork of Techscriptor with some interface improvements and adapt it to Brazilian Portuguese. That's how version 0.1 of Verbalize was born.

      What does it do?

      In a basic and summarised way, you can upload a file from your computer (in md or txt, for now) and the editor, besides allowing you to actually edit, will give you hints on how to improve the text (long sentences, complex words, jargon, adjectives and other things we should avoid in texts, especially technical ones).

      Once edited, you can download the file in md format.

      Access

      The application can be installed (Electron), accessed through the web, or you can download the code from GitHub and run it locally in your browser.

      Improvements

      I have a few 'next steps' in mind:

      • Google Drive/Onedrive integration.
      • Possibility to upload a custom rules file.
      • Allow it to be used offline as well.
      • Improve the GUI.
      9 votes

    44. Suggestions for used and modular laptop for language learning

      ~tech Ask (recommendations)
      I've recently come back to studying German, after having taken a small break for a few months for a new job. My main form of study is immersion (I recently stumbled across the books of Walter...

      I've recently come back to studying German, after having taken a small break for a few months for a new job.

      My main form of study is immersion (I recently stumbled across the books of Walter Moers and haven't looked back since) and conversation practice on iTalki.

      Nowadays, I try my hardest to only buy tech second-hand and preferably as future proof and modular as possible. My go-to machines are a fully modded Lenovo Thinkpad T430, and a more humble Thinkpad X230, both running Linux (Ubuntu and PopOS respectively). They work just fine for my basic needs (mostly surfing, some occasional streaming and word processing). But they struggle during my conversation lessons on iTalki or Zoom, most of the time either overheating or freezing/stumbling. I realize this might be a Linux problem, but I have also found the web camera and built-in microphone on both machines to be really inadequate for video calls. I gave up using my own laptops for my language lessons over a year ago, and now have resorted to stealing my partners Macbook, which isn't ideal.

      Do you have any recommendations for any more recent laptops that would offer a better video conference experience, while offering at least a removable battery? Pricewise it would be great to be find something below €500 used.

      5 votes

    46. Viossa and venting about Etymology Nerd

      ~humanities.languages Text 877 words
      The first half of this post is a vent about recent events I have to get out of my system. Below is some hopefully actually interesting content about the constructed conpidgin Viossa. If you are...

      The first half of this post is a vent about recent events I have to get out of my system. Below is some hopefully actually interesting content about the constructed conpidgin Viossa.

      If you are interested in languages & linguistics and, like me, are not immune to the draw of short-form video content, you are probably familiar with the creator Etymology Nerd. He makes shorts on TikTok and other platforms about all things linguistics, usually pointing out some cool facet or etymology. The videos are, due to the their length, often very surface level, but they’re informative and fun, and for the most part, accurate enough – at least as far as I can tell. However, two days ago, he posted this short on TikTok and then a bit later to YouTube: conlangs are so back. It points the spotlight on a constructed language by the name of Viossa: A collaborative con-pidgin, that is, a conlang created by users attempting to establish communication despite speaking different languages. This is rather meaningful to me, as I was one of the original co-creators of Viossa – more on that below. At first, I was quite happy about this, until I went to check out the Discord server and found it effectively on fire. While there were about 1700 members on the discord server, the number of active members was much smaller, certainly less than 100.

      In the first day after the TikTok video, over 1000 users sought out the discord server and joined it.

      Etymology Nerd didn’t ask for permission, he did not even give a heads-up. He found and joined the server on the 27th, asked a few questions, and then posted his short on TikTok two hours later. And while he learned that the server’s moderation was getting overwhelmed, he reposted the video to YouTube unchanged the next day anyway, merely leaving a pinned comment asking people to be respectful. The Viossa discord is currently on lockdown (invites paused) until things settle down. In the meantime, the short has amassed close to two million views on TikTok & Youtube combined. While I don’t think this can be called malicious, it speaks of a lack of care of the impact it can have to shine a spotlight on a small community when you have such a big following. Who cares what happens to them, I got my clicks, right?

      But that’s enough venting. Time for some history. As I mentioned above, I was one of the people who started this whole thing. Back in 2014, before Discord, there was a Skype group for people interested in conlangs. I was in high school at the time, as were most other members – reddit demographics. We realized that many of us spoke at least one language other than English, and decided to conduct an experiment: Could we establish communication through those other languages by finding common grounds and learning each other’s words for things? So on Christmas Eve that year, six of us hopped into a video call and tried to communicate without using English. Each of us would contribute with one or two languages: Norwegian, Finnish, Japanese, Irish, Albanian&Greek and Swiss German. Within the first night, we had a few words and could ask simple questions. Within the first week, we had a few hundred words and were able to hold uninterrupted, if simple, conversations. We had some other people join the project over the course of the first year, and presented the results on reddit:

      Things continued quietly from then on. The number of members grew slowly, while others got bored and dropped out of the project. At some point, Discord rolled around and the community moved there – a far easier platform to join than Skype. Some copycat projects sprung up, but to my knowledge, sadly none really persisted. In 2017, I held a talk at the Language Creation Conference about this style of language creation, and on Viossa in particular. The conference was livestreamed, so you can watch it on Youtube here (ca. 30 minutes):

      A major influx of new members came in 2020, when Jan Misali made a video on the language as part of his Conlang Critic series. His video is extremely well put-together, and created in close collaboration with many regular members of the community, and it really is the best showcase of what Viossa had become in the six years since its inception. You can find it here:

      This video put the project on the radar for many more people, and it has definitely changed the language. When you get many learners in a short amount of time, the things they pick up tend to reinforce each other, and you get sudden drastic shifts. I’m finding that I struggle with understanding a lot more of the language used by people who joined after this video than from other oldtimers. Then things settled again, until the etymologynerd post two days ago.

      And that’s the history of, weirdly, one of the more successful constructed languages, built on just two rules:

      1. If you can understand it, it’s correct Viossa.
      2. Learn Viossa through Viossa, no translation.
      20 votes