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I don't think its necessarily about the culture itself here, its merely a cheap populist tactic to rabble-rouse among a nation that has a rich history and strug

I don't think its necessarily about the culture itself here, its merely a cheap populist tactic to rabble-rouse among a nation that has a rich history and struggles to handle the fact that its present isn't at that zenith. France do a lot of this sort of thing too. I would argue that belittling cultural preservation demonstrates deep Anglo-centric bias. While its fine for lulz, I worry that you're being sincere. Try asking _anyone_ who doesn't have English as their first language in a serious context how they feel about their language and you'll struggle to find someone without a genuine fondness for it. On paper there is absolutely nothing wrong with cultures seeking to preserve the use of their own language, however it is fair for us to argue that restrictive and punitive measures such as this are not helpful. Bear in mind one day English will no longer be the lingua franca as demonstrated by the word for lingua franca. ;). Would English then be a "relic" to you?

ghusto 4y ago
> Try asking _anyone_ who doesn't have English as their first language in a serious context how they feel about their language I asked myself, and I said; 'meh'. Admittedly I speak English better than my first language now, and I'm also being deliberately facetious, but it's also true that I don't much care about my first language. > Bear in mind one day English will no longer be the lingua franca as demonstrated by the word for lingua franca. ;) I used to think it was hilariously ironic too, but then I stumbled on the actual etymology one day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca?oldformat=true#Etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca?oldformat=true#E...
throw_a_grenade 4y ago
> Try asking _anyone_ who doesn't have English as their first language in a serious context how they feel about their language and you'll struggle to find someone without a genuine fondness for it. Well. My first language is Polish, and there are some of us who call it "superpowers". If you go to a conference, you can be quite sure no-one understands you apart from your friend who you are talking to, and possibly that one passer by, who is also Polish or Ukrainian. That is, unless we start to curse. Then we are probably well understood.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  There’s a bit in the American TV series Fresh Off The Boat where the parents start shouting very normal sentences in Chinese so that it looks like a fake heated argument, and the salesman offers them a discount to get them to stop scaring the customers.
- stavros 4y ago
  Greek here, nobody understands us, period. It isn't anywhere close to anything else.
  - BiteCode_dev 4y ago
    I usually can grab a few things from tone alone for a lot of languages. But I got a new greek buddy recently, and when she talks on the phone, my ears cannot lock on anything. Edit: completely unrelated, but I saw your username on lobster on a dead man switch thread (I use Shamir’s Secret for treasure hunts to I thought the DMS idea was cool). Do you happen to have invites? I started to write again, and wanted to post something but I don't have any account.
    - stavros 4y ago
      Yeah, it's so far from other languages that you probably can't make out any of the words at all. I think I have some invites, can you email me about it?
      - BiteCode_dev 4y ago
        Just did. Cheers.
- Swizec 4y ago
  As a Slovenian … I don’t have this superpower because I’m usually the only Slovenian there. There was a conference in NYC once where at least 10 people tried to introduce me to the one other Slovenian there, it was pretty funny. Slovenia being small, we had already met years ago at a local meetup or something.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
I'm Italian, living in Canada, the reason why I'm attached to my primary language is because I know the most vocabulary and language usage. Aside from that, it's an unfortunate language, since you can't use to communicate anywhere else beside Italy. We tend to forget that the main purpose of a language is communication, when invoking cultural issues. If you have to penalize usage of English words, you are doing something really wrong. And when I talk about work it's really hard for me to do in my home language. Some words have no translation or incorrect translation (I work as software developer), which incidentally is the same situation my Italian teacher faced when trying to explain some concepts that had a translation in Italian, but the original latin word had a "wider meaning" that wasn't captured by the translation.
- lwhi 4y ago
  Difficult to find a word for 'snow globe' too ..
  - ithkuil 4y ago
    This is an artefact of how Germanic languages can often just glue words together without explicit connective words "Sfera di neve" doesn't like a word whole "snow globe" does and indeed some write it as "snowglobe"
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      That's not especially distinctive of Germanic languages. Chinese will do it exactly the same way, though the chains of nouns that are common in Germanic would be unusual to say the least in Chinese. But gluing words together without explicit connections is common pretty much everywhere. Compare Greek, which freely forms adjectives that way, or Latin sanguisuga "bloodsuck[er]" (leech) or lucifer "light-bear[er]" (light-bearer).
      - ithkuil 4y ago
        it can be done in romance languages such as italian, but it's way more frequent that one word has to be a verb and another a noun: sanguisuga (blood sucker), magiafuoco (fire eater), porta tagliafuoco (fire resistent door), apri-pista, or noun+adjective: cassaforte (strong box, safe) or preposition+noun: oltretomba (beyond the grave, after life) There are cases like noun+noun but they are rare and they are not productive, i.e. I cannot make one up. Pescecane (fish dog, i.e. a shark) is ok, but you cannot "sferaneve" for a snowball Probably the reason is that the two nouns have to have a special relation for it to work, i.e. one word has to act as an adjective, it has to qualify the first word somehow. The shark is a fish, but is a fish that bites like a dog, hence it's a fishdog a pescecane. Similarly "casa madre", for headquarters, it's not a house of the mother ("case della madre") but it's a special kind of house that has the quality of "gatherhing the whole family together like if in the case of a real family"
rhaway84773 4y ago
The phrase lingua Franca is a great example of why English is the most international language in the world. It’s because of its ability to absorb from different languages. That phrase is as English as the word tomato today.
- somethingsaid 4y ago
  The phrase lingua Franca shows why languages become dominant, because they’re the one spoken by the most powerful group of people. It’s not because English is uniquely good at absorbing from different languages. Japanese uses a ton of foreign loanwords for things. So does Hindu. Lingua Franca is a phrase in the most dominant language 2000 years ago, about the most dominante language 1000 years ago, used in the dominant language now. All of those languages used tons of loanwords as well. Someday Mandarin or Hindu may become the most dominant and they will use loanwords, and phrases from those languages will slip into English speech. But those changes won’t be because English in unique in some way, it will be because that’s how languages work.
  - kartoolOz 4y ago
    Hindu - is someone who practices Hinduism and identifies as such, its not a language, that's Hindi.
    - somethingsaid 4y ago
      Sorry, my bad. I should have double checked. Thanks for pointing it out.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    >The phrase lingua Franca shows why languages become dominant, because they’re the one spoken by the most powerful group of people. It’s not because English is uniquely good at absorbing from different languages. Japanese uses a ton of foreign loanwords for things. So does Hindu. This isn't true. English is easily the most-spoken 2nd language in the world, and it's not just because of Anglophone nation power, it's because English is an easily-learned language. I live in Japan, and while Japanese borrows a lot of foreign words (mostly from English), it's not ever going to become dominant because it's just too hard to learn. It's the same with Chinese. Any language that requires you to learn thousands of glyphs just to be fluent in the written version isn't going to go far worldwide compared to a language that uses 26 (and shares those with a large array of other languages). English is a uniquely simple language to learn compared to the languages of other powerful nations (Chinese, Japanese, Russian, German); some of those have extremely baroque writing systems (or simply unique and different, for Cyrillic), and all of them have very complicated grammar rules. By contrast, any idiot can learn a little basic English quickly and speak it well enough to be understood, even if it's technically incorrect.
jacquesm 4y ago
> you'll struggle to find someone without a genuine fondness for it I'm such a person. I realize that any kind of preference I have for the language that I grew up with is an accident of birth. It helps to be part of a country that is so small as to be irrelevant in the greater scheme of things. Life doesn't stop at the border and if you want to be active at all then you're going to have to interact with people speaking different languages. English, German and French to begin with, and maybe Spanish, Chinese and one of the Slavic languages after that. I think English is here to stay in a way that Latin never was, the digital repository of English text is absolutely massive, unless you want to limit yourself you simply have to speak English. When there was no internet that meant books and once the printing press was invented and books were no longer in very limited circulation (and reading and writing became more common skills) written culture really took off. The Roman empire is what drove the spread of Latin and once the empire collapsed it took Latin with it, with the exception of some niche uses (science, mostly, and religious texts).
WA 4y ago
First paragraph, I agree. This however, not: > I would argue that belittling cultural preservation demonstrates deep Anglo-centric bias. Counter point: I’m German. We currently have a lot of discussions about gender-fication of the German language. This has nothing to do with an Anglo-centric bias and still, we have exactly the same talking points. On the one hand, it’s preserving language how it is spoken and written for the last 100 years, on the other hand, it’s about the biases in the language and how to overcome them.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > how it is spoken and written for the last 100 years make it more like 1 thousand years. The point is culture and language evolve naturally and organically, so the language is not biased, people are. Discussing on how to remove biased from a language is the same think as to say "someone wants to put their biases in". It's true that it is happening, in the richest western countries only though, it is also true that it is because the Anglo-centric bias is predominant in the west when it's about social networks and influence on younger generations. In China kids are restricted from using social networks and consequentially are not exposed to "content creators" that are just trying to ride the indignation wave to profit. it is also a well know fact that Chinese kids test scores on average are much better than the average western kids ones. this is another bias we are importing from Anglo-centric World, that we aren't discussing enough. https://www.statista.com/chart/28802/childhood-aspirations-in-china-us-uk/ https://www.statista.com/chart/28802/childhood-aspirations-i...
kiidev 4y ago
The ironic thing is that half of Italy doesn't speak italian
wink 4y ago
Genuine fondness? I suppose if I wasn't interested in languages per se I might as well have zero positive things to say about German. Being on the internet for 25 years, working in international teams, playing online games on international servers - there were weeks and months where I barely used any German on a given day, compared to English, and that's fine. I also don't see a reason why you would support the region you were born at all, if you like something else better. Tons of people move away and have zero regrets. Does reverse nationalism exist? :P
Hendrikto 4y ago
> Try asking _anyone_ who doesn't have English as their first language in a serious context how they feel about their language and you'll struggle to find someone without a genuine fondness for it. I‘m German, and I don‘t care for that language. It‘s unnecessarily complex.
DannyBee 4y ago
There are many good reasons to learn from cultures, to understand them, etc. But cultural preservation is a means and not an end, unlike you seem to be arguing. When made into its own end, Cultural preservation for the sake of cultural preservation simply exists to build barriers and differences between people. That is literally the purpose when it is its own goal. To build a shared thing among a group that others do not have, so you can divide your group from them. Cultural preservation only unites people by pitting them against an out group. I'm honestly unsure how you can argue otherwise. It has been the cause of many great atrocities precisely because it always creates an out group. So yes, preserving culture for the sake of preserving culture is a net negative for society. The rest simply becomes an argument that nobody should ever have change. Good luck with that. Change comes for us all. None of us live long enough that we should get to try to force future generations to abide our way of thinking.

ghusto 4y ago

> Try asking _anyone_ who doesn't have English as their first language in a serious context how they feel about their language I asked myself, and I said; 'meh'. Admittedly I speak English better than my first language now, and I'm also being deliberately facetious, but it's also true that I don't much care about my first language. > Bear in mind one day English will no longer be the lingua franca as demonstrated by the word for lingua franca. ;) I used to think it was hilariously ironic too, but then I stumbled on the actual etymology one day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca?oldformat=true#Etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca?oldformat=true#E...

throw_a_grenade 4y ago

> Try asking _anyone_ who doesn't have English as their first language in a serious context how they feel about their language and you'll struggle to find someone without a genuine fondness for it. Well. My first language is Polish, and there are some of us who call it "superpowers". If you go to a conference, you can be quite sure no-one understands you apart from your friend who you are talking to, and possibly that one passer by, who is also Polish or Ukrainian. That is, unless we start to curse. Then we are probably well understood.

bobthepanda 4y ago
There’s a bit in the American TV series Fresh Off The Boat where the parents start shouting very normal sentences in Chinese so that it looks like a fake heated argument, and the salesman offers them a discount to get them to stop scaring the customers.
stavros 4y ago
Greek here, nobody understands us, period. It isn't anywhere close to anything else.
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  I usually can grab a few things from tone alone for a lot of languages. But I got a new greek buddy recently, and when she talks on the phone, my ears cannot lock on anything. Edit: completely unrelated, but I saw your username on lobster on a dead man switch thread (I use Shamir’s Secret for treasure hunts to I thought the DMS idea was cool). Do you happen to have invites? I started to write again, and wanted to post something but I don't have any account.
  - stavros 4y ago
    Yeah, it's so far from other languages that you probably can't make out any of the words at all. I think I have some invites, can you email me about it?
    - BiteCode_dev 4y ago
      Just did. Cheers.
Swizec 4y ago
As a Slovenian … I don’t have this superpower because I’m usually the only Slovenian there. There was a conference in NYC once where at least 10 people tried to introduce me to the one other Slovenian there, it was pretty funny. Slovenia being small, we had already met years ago at a local meetup or something.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago

I'm Italian, living in Canada, the reason why I'm attached to my primary language is because I know the most vocabulary and language usage. Aside from that, it's an unfortunate language, since you can't use to communicate anywhere else beside Italy. We tend to forget that the main purpose of a language is communication, when invoking cultural issues. If you have to penalize usage of English words, you are doing something really wrong. And when I talk about work it's really hard for me to do in my home language. Some words have no translation or incorrect translation (I work as software developer), which incidentally is the same situation my Italian teacher faced when trying to explain some concepts that had a translation in Italian, but the original latin word had a "wider meaning" that wasn't captured by the translation.

lwhi 4y ago
Difficult to find a word for 'snow globe' too ..
- ithkuil 4y ago
  This is an artefact of how Germanic languages can often just glue words together without explicit connective words "Sfera di neve" doesn't like a word whole "snow globe" does and indeed some write it as "snowglobe"
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    That's not especially distinctive of Germanic languages. Chinese will do it exactly the same way, though the chains of nouns that are common in Germanic would be unusual to say the least in Chinese. But gluing words together without explicit connections is common pretty much everywhere. Compare Greek, which freely forms adjectives that way, or Latin sanguisuga "bloodsuck[er]" (leech) or lucifer "light-bear[er]" (light-bearer).
    - ithkuil 4y ago
      it can be done in romance languages such as italian, but it's way more frequent that one word has to be a verb and another a noun: sanguisuga (blood sucker), magiafuoco (fire eater), porta tagliafuoco (fire resistent door), apri-pista, or noun+adjective: cassaforte (strong box, safe) or preposition+noun: oltretomba (beyond the grave, after life) There are cases like noun+noun but they are rare and they are not productive, i.e. I cannot make one up. Pescecane (fish dog, i.e. a shark) is ok, but you cannot "sferaneve" for a snowball Probably the reason is that the two nouns have to have a special relation for it to work, i.e. one word has to act as an adjective, it has to qualify the first word somehow. The shark is a fish, but is a fish that bites like a dog, hence it's a fishdog a pescecane. Similarly "casa madre", for headquarters, it's not a house of the mother ("case della madre") but it's a special kind of house that has the quality of "gatherhing the whole family together like if in the case of a real family"

rhaway84773 4y ago

The phrase lingua Franca is a great example of why English is the most international language in the world. It’s because of its ability to absorb from different languages. That phrase is as English as the word tomato today.

somethingsaid 4y ago
The phrase lingua Franca shows why languages become dominant, because they’re the one spoken by the most powerful group of people. It’s not because English is uniquely good at absorbing from different languages. Japanese uses a ton of foreign loanwords for things. So does Hindu. Lingua Franca is a phrase in the most dominant language 2000 years ago, about the most dominante language 1000 years ago, used in the dominant language now. All of those languages used tons of loanwords as well. Someday Mandarin or Hindu may become the most dominant and they will use loanwords, and phrases from those languages will slip into English speech. But those changes won’t be because English in unique in some way, it will be because that’s how languages work.
- kartoolOz 4y ago
  Hindu - is someone who practices Hinduism and identifies as such, its not a language, that's Hindi.
  - somethingsaid 4y ago
    Sorry, my bad. I should have double checked. Thanks for pointing it out.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  >The phrase lingua Franca shows why languages become dominant, because they’re the one spoken by the most powerful group of people. It’s not because English is uniquely good at absorbing from different languages. Japanese uses a ton of foreign loanwords for things. So does Hindu. This isn't true. English is easily the most-spoken 2nd language in the world, and it's not just because of Anglophone nation power, it's because English is an easily-learned language. I live in Japan, and while Japanese borrows a lot of foreign words (mostly from English), it's not ever going to become dominant because it's just too hard to learn. It's the same with Chinese. Any language that requires you to learn thousands of glyphs just to be fluent in the written version isn't going to go far worldwide compared to a language that uses 26 (and shares those with a large array of other languages). English is a uniquely simple language to learn compared to the languages of other powerful nations (Chinese, Japanese, Russian, German); some of those have extremely baroque writing systems (or simply unique and different, for Cyrillic), and all of them have very complicated grammar rules. By contrast, any idiot can learn a little basic English quickly and speak it well enough to be understood, even if it's technically incorrect.

jacquesm 4y ago

> you'll struggle to find someone without a genuine fondness for it I'm such a person. I realize that any kind of preference I have for the language that I grew up with is an accident of birth. It helps to be part of a country that is so small as to be irrelevant in the greater scheme of things. Life doesn't stop at the border and if you want to be active at all then you're going to have to interact with people speaking different languages. English, German and French to begin with, and maybe Spanish, Chinese and one of the Slavic languages after that. I think English is here to stay in a way that Latin never was, the digital repository of English text is absolutely massive, unless you want to limit yourself you simply have to speak English. When there was no internet that meant books and once the printing press was invented and books were no longer in very limited circulation (and reading and writing became more common skills) written culture really took off. The Roman empire is what drove the spread of Latin and once the empire collapsed it took Latin with it, with the exception of some niche uses (science, mostly, and religious texts).

WA 4y ago

First paragraph, I agree. This however, not: > I would argue that belittling cultural preservation demonstrates deep Anglo-centric bias. Counter point: I’m German. We currently have a lot of discussions about gender-fication of the German language. This has nothing to do with an Anglo-centric bias and still, we have exactly the same talking points. On the one hand, it’s preserving language how it is spoken and written for the last 100 years, on the other hand, it’s about the biases in the language and how to overcome them.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> how it is spoken and written for the last 100 years make it more like 1 thousand years. The point is culture and language evolve naturally and organically, so the language is not biased, people are. Discussing on how to remove biased from a language is the same think as to say "someone wants to put their biases in". It's true that it is happening, in the richest western countries only though, it is also true that it is because the Anglo-centric bias is predominant in the west when it's about social networks and influence on younger generations. In China kids are restricted from using social networks and consequentially are not exposed to "content creators" that are just trying to ride the indignation wave to profit. it is also a well know fact that Chinese kids test scores on average are much better than the average western kids ones. this is another bias we are importing from Anglo-centric World, that we aren't discussing enough. https://www.statista.com/chart/28802/childhood-aspirations-in-china-us-uk/ https://www.statista.com/chart/28802/childhood-aspirations-i...

kiidev 4y ago

The ironic thing is that half of Italy doesn't speak italian

wink 4y ago

Genuine fondness? I suppose if I wasn't interested in languages per se I might as well have zero positive things to say about German. Being on the internet for 25 years, working in international teams, playing online games on international servers - there were weeks and months where I barely used any German on a given day, compared to English, and that's fine. I also don't see a reason why you would support the region you were born at all, if you like something else better. Tons of people move away and have zero regrets. Does reverse nationalism exist? :P

Hendrikto 4y ago

DannyBee 4y ago

There are many good reasons to learn from cultures, to understand them, etc. But cultural preservation is a means and not an end, unlike you seem to be arguing. When made into its own end, Cultural preservation for the sake of cultural preservation simply exists to build barriers and differences between people. That is literally the purpose when it is its own goal. To build a shared thing among a group that others do not have, so you can divide your group from them. Cultural preservation only unites people by pitting them against an out group. I'm honestly unsure how you can argue otherwise. It has been the cause of many great atrocities precisely because it always creates an out group. So yes, preserving culture for the sake of preserving culture is a net negative for society. The rest simply becomes an argument that nobody should ever have change. Good luck with that. Change comes for us all. None of us live long enough that we should get to try to force future generations to abide our way of thinking.