5 ms·

> This made me realize that the rules are arbitrary and what matters is if people can understand what you're saying. doohureehliebeeleafþatt?

kelseyfrog 4y ago
While I'm probably responding to a joke, intelligibility isn't simply a binary. It's how we're able to have interesting connections between dialects or Danish, Swedish, Norwegian for example. The first rule of communication is knowing your audience and if one's language can be adapted in simplicity, complexity, lexicon, grammar, content, style, voice, medium &c to be more readily understood, then it's in the speaker's benefit to do so. If GP's teacher could not earnestly understand vulgar English then by all means adapt, but the sense that I'm getting is that they were being obstinate on purpose and those sort of people should live in the communicative bubble of isolation they put themselves in.
- Archelaos 4y ago
  Well, my "joke" was ment as a demonstration, that the rules have the purpose to make it easy to be understood. I bent the rules a bit, so that it should still be possible to decode my message, but not easily. This should demonstrate that rules are not completely arbitrary, even if (some) people can understand what I am saying.
anyfoo 4y ago
You're showing a case though where you diverge from the current conventions so much that it's incredibly hard to understand what you're saying, so I'm not sure you're going against OP's point. By the way, as a European person (speaking multiple European languages, even) living in the US for a decade, you quickly give up on taking language "rules" too seriously or else you go insane. What English (partly US English, partly "English in general") does to foreign words is... interesting. Also interesting is that unlike any other language I speak, reading a word in English is often not sufficient to know how it's pronounced. Yes, French's orthography for example seems enormously complex ("Bordeaux"?) compared to e.g. German or Italian, but it's still consistent. If I had to guess, I'd think that's too a large part because of things like the Great Vowel Shift, and loan words from multiple languages. (Not a linguist though, so eh, just stupid guesses.)
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > What English (partly US English, partly "English in general") does to foreign words is... interesting. Also interesting is that unlike any other language I speak, reading a word in English is often not sufficient to know how it's pronounced. Yes, French's orthography for example seems enormously complex ("Bordeaux"?) compared to e.g. German or Italian, but it's still consistent. The French don't seem to agree. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homographe https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homographe
  - anyfoo 4y ago
    Okay yeah, especially around the "-ent" ending, and sometimes whether a final s is pronounced, it can be ambiguous. So maybe my feeling that it's much harder in English than in French is just personal bias. German and Italian on the other hand... (of course every language still has exceptions, plenty of).

kelseyfrog 4y ago

While I'm probably responding to a joke, intelligibility isn't simply a binary. It's how we're able to have interesting connections between dialects or Danish, Swedish, Norwegian for example. The first rule of communication is knowing your audience and if one's language can be adapted in simplicity, complexity, lexicon, grammar, content, style, voice, medium &c to be more readily understood, then it's in the speaker's benefit to do so. If GP's teacher could not earnestly understand vulgar English then by all means adapt, but the sense that I'm getting is that they were being obstinate on purpose and those sort of people should live in the communicative bubble of isolation they put themselves in.

Archelaos 4y ago
Well, my "joke" was ment as a demonstration, that the rules have the purpose to make it easy to be understood. I bent the rules a bit, so that it should still be possible to decode my message, but not easily. This should demonstrate that rules are not completely arbitrary, even if (some) people can understand what I am saying.

anyfoo 4y ago

You're showing a case though where you diverge from the current conventions so much that it's incredibly hard to understand what you're saying, so I'm not sure you're going against OP's point. By the way, as a European person (speaking multiple European languages, even) living in the US for a decade, you quickly give up on taking language "rules" too seriously or else you go insane. What English (partly US English, partly "English in general") does to foreign words is... interesting. Also interesting is that unlike any other language I speak, reading a word in English is often not sufficient to know how it's pronounced. Yes, French's orthography for example seems enormously complex ("Bordeaux"?) compared to e.g. German or Italian, but it's still consistent. If I had to guess, I'd think that's too a large part because of things like the Great Vowel Shift, and loan words from multiple languages. (Not a linguist though, so eh, just stupid guesses.)

thaumasiotes 4y ago
> What English (partly US English, partly "English in general") does to foreign words is... interesting. Also interesting is that unlike any other language I speak, reading a word in English is often not sufficient to know how it's pronounced. Yes, French's orthography for example seems enormously complex ("Bordeaux"?) compared to e.g. German or Italian, but it's still consistent. The French don't seem to agree. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homographe https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homographe
- anyfoo 4y ago
  Okay yeah, especially around the "-ent" ending, and sometimes whether a final s is pronounced, it can be ambiguous. So maybe my feeling that it's much harder in English than in French is just personal bias. German and Italian on the other hand... (of course every language still has exceptions, plenty of).