Thank you for beating the Central Powers during WWI. I had German in highschool and it is the worst. (The only worse language is Dutch, [het kofschip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27t_kofschip), wtf people).
Now that I've clicked on the link I see that he does mention the importance of colonizing and how Spanish lost out because its colonizers weren't as effective.
I'm not sure I'm going to take seriously his main thesis about English being the only language where the bureaucratic dialect has more prestige than local dialects until I hear it from someone who has studied a whole lot more languages and cultures, though. It's an interesting half-baked hypothesis, but is it even true for Parisian French in France? Will you really be sneered at and looked down on in France if you speak standard French instead of Gallo or Provençal or Lorrain? His low-prestige TV-Hindi example is really interesting and I'm glad I learned about it, but I suspect (without having done the research myself) that it doesn't apply to a lot of places where a metropolis successfully culturally colonized the nation around it.
Has he [looked into](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestige_(sociolinguistics\)) any of the actual research on this, or is he just having fun with an idea that has some random chance of being true? (Not that there's anything wrong with that... it can be a bit of fun, as long as you're recognizing that you're just having a bit of fun.)
With respect to France, one of my mother’s (Scottish) favourite phrases comes to mind, “a language is a dialect with an army behind it”, which refers to how so-called “languages” generally become standardised for political reasons
In the case of “low-prestige” Hindi things are a little bit different, but still ultimately political due to the dominance of a centralised bureaucracy in India which aimed after de-colonisation and partition to create a unified state under a common language of the ruling/majority class (for an extreme example Hindutva or Indira Ghandi’s attacks on Punjab)
His basic point is too vague to really look into, but his acknowledgement that status is involved - while not wrong as such - is also so buried in effulgencies about what status *is* make it hard to take seriously from a historical linguistics perspective
Your point about Hindi is true in a lot more places than most people realize, the main difference is that the central authority enforced consistency within living memory.
One of the projects that the French revolutionary governments took on was wiping out other languages within the borders of France in the name of national unity. This has greatly diminished the prevalence of languages like Occitan, Basque, Gascon among others. You just don’t hear about it very much, since the vast majority of this happened outside of living memory, while the same process in India is more recent.
Go fuck yourself, I’m dyspraxic and these stupid fucking spelling bots piss me the fuck off when they correct me for a fucking minor typo because I’ve taken shit my whole fucking life with assholes doing this in spite of being knowledgeable about the shit I’m actually knowledgeable from assholes like whoever built this fucking bot, and I’m not gonna take shit from whatever childish prick who built this thing as some stupid fucking toy for reddit
Banned, obviously
>Will you really be sneered at and looked down on in France if you speak standard French instead of Gallo or Provençal or Lorrain?
They make fun of Belgians all the time. It's like a meme.
as someone who publishes in linguistics & teaches in areas close to this one sometimes, I don't find this necessarily the best example of sneerable content. it's pretty vague and inexpert, but not really all that different from what histories and analyses of global English tend to say these days. it's more of a yawn than a sneer to me...
I’m not published in linguistics and wasn’t ever that good at it, but I do have some linguistics background, and as an expert in sneering and I do think it fits
Linguists do of course talk about prestige dialects in ways that are superficially similar to this, but the superficiality is the problem
On the surface level there’s some kind of thought going on but when you take a deeper look there’s an arrogant presumptiveness about how to talk about language that ruins all good-faith
A) I don’t believe that that would be utopia for most people.
B) Anyone who expressed that opinion to me in person would get the “I’m getting the shotgun, you need to leave now” treatment.
Excuse me? What the fuck is a top-heavy or bottom-heavy language? I
have a degree in linguistics and you can bet your ass I’ve never heard
this terminology before.
So... the concept of overt prestige, but incorrectly (in that horrid strong-sapir-whorf kinda way) applied to whole languages instead of speech varieties. Got it, thank you.
...how very rationalist-like, though, to reinvent worse terminology for something a field already has plenty of literature about.
I am probably not the first one to think of this, But these Silicon Valley Rationalist types give off the same vibe as Ayn Randian Objectivists of previous generations.
A sociopath of his own weird definition, there is a long post about this. The Gervais principle.
Iirc it means more 'devious corporate ladder climber'than actual sociopath.
Because why invent new terms (for things onow in the scientific fields) when you can just make up new meanings for old terms. (Or overload old terms if you want to speak coder).
vgr's engineering syllabus: [Venkatesh Rao on Twitter: "Huh interesting the syllabus of my undergrad program has changed quite a bit. They’ve added an environment class, reduced machine design from 3 to 2 classes, expanded CS from 1 to 2, and combined it with a biology (???) section... and added a controls lab. https://t.co/NAZhM7J4Y5" / Twitter](https://mobile.twitter.com/vgr/status/1373725261162708994)
You can accuse vgr of many things but being a rationalist is probably not one of them. He does like to pull concepts and terminology out of his ass and develop them at length; that is kind of his brand. But he would never make the sort of absurd epistemological claims for them that rationalism does.
I also find it funny how they seem to be willfully ignorant of the fact that several languages have central authorities for grammar and vocabulary, and in some countries this is an extremely prestigious (read: elite) position.
This is why colleges have obligatory humanities requirements for STEM
students. So they don’t get pants-on-head ideas about how the rest of
society works like this one
but they’re so confident in their big-brain status that they went for
the easy-A classes instead of maybe taking an opportunity to update
their priors. So frustrating
It's weird that in european universities this is usually not at all a requirement and very unusual -no STEM degree requires you taking any classes outside of STEM in Germany for example - and yet the engineer brain seems to be less of a problem than in american institutions.
Here in America this is known as the “liberal arts” tradition; the idea that even if you’re pursuing a STEM degree, you should be grounded in the humanities. I get the feeling it’s a more popular concept here than it is in Europe.
In Germany there is something called the "Humboldtsche Bildungsideal" - so the education ideal of Humboldt. It's going in a similar direction but is more about students being free to study and professors to teach what they deem important. Also in Germany you need to pass the Abitur after studying at a Gymnasium before being allowed into higher education at all - so to a certain extent this kind of "well rounded education" is already assumed for anyone going for an academic degree.
This is really due to WW1 and WW2(really) resulting a situation where
50% of the world’s wealth was American and 90% of the world’s television
shows in 1950, combined with the spread of _American_ multinationals
America made the self conscious decision that exporting American culture would be a strategic objective in the ongoing fight against the USSR. It was pretty much guaranteed that either English or Russian was going to be the global second language by the end of the 20th century.
I’d guess BEU English is a mid-level language like C, while most
languages are high-level.
Yeah, English is really the C of natural languages. If only it was
garbage collected and had proper namespacing, maybe it would be more
user-friendly. My first attempt at writing a given sentence in English
often ends up creating memory leaks, and the fact English arrays decay
to bare pointers and don’t know their own length really drags it
down.
… Ok, no, what on earth is this analogy even supposed to mean? I have
programmed quite a bit in C, and I have studied a fair bit of
linguistics (and I speak English!), but I still can’t make any sense out
of this. Is it just a way of saying bureaucratic English is less
expressive and culturally specific, like how C lacks higher-level
abstractions? Why would he think this is a remotely good way to
communicate this idea? Or does it mean something else? I can’t figure it
out.
English is the only language where the slightly anemic middle-class
“TV newscaster” version, rather than the robust and colorful working
class version, is the most powerful “distribution” so to speak. It’s a
middle-heavy language, class-anatomically speaking.
He said, on the site that’s practically an assembly line for white
English speakers appropriating butchered AAVE. But, I dunno, I guess it
do be like that.
Terms like based and woke come from AAVE, and there are a lot more things like this. (I assume 'it do be like that' is another one).
But people now knowing this, or not realizing it fits with the American culture, which has always taken cultural things from African Americans whitewashed them and sold them, and then people forgot where it came from. See the history of rock and jazz for example.
He is really into neolib global middle class as the “ideal class” and
basically sneers at American poor/WC partly for racism and partly
because he thinks they’re dumb
I am sick of vgr defending scott (claiming he was unfairly
persecuted, not racist etc.) even if he finds the rationalists silly,
being OK with the 2nd-most important writer of ribbonfield being a
racist *eugenicist, etc. etc.
The more I look at the whole (post)rationalist-Paperfarm enterprise
the more it seems to me the intellectual byproduct of people who need to
1. be … normal, associate with normies 2. go outside, maybe work for a
normal job
“Global institutions that co-evolved with modernity” == we beat Germany in WWI and that’s why all the chemistry journals are in English now.
[deleted]
“Most other languages are bottom heavy, including Spanish. There are no living top-heavy languages. The elites of any language are generally not numerous enough to drive the overall evolution of a language, only their uppity dialects.”
Excuse me? What the fuck is a top-heavy or bottom-heavy language? I have a degree in linguistics and you can bet your ass I’ve never heard this terminology before.
This is why colleges have obligatory humanities requirements for STEM students. So they don’t get pants-on-head ideas about how the rest of society works like this one
but they’re so confident in their big-brain status that they went for the easy-A classes instead of maybe taking an opportunity to update their priors. So frustrating
This is really due to WW1 and WW2(really) resulting a situation where 50% of the world’s wealth was American and 90% of the world’s television shows in 1950, combined with the spread of _American_ multinationals
Yeah, English is really the C of natural languages. If only it was garbage collected and had proper namespacing, maybe it would be more user-friendly. My first attempt at writing a given sentence in English often ends up creating memory leaks, and the fact English arrays decay to bare pointers and don’t know their own length really drags it down.
… Ok, no, what on earth is this analogy even supposed to mean? I have programmed quite a bit in C, and I have studied a fair bit of linguistics (and I speak English!), but I still can’t make any sense out of this. Is it just a way of saying bureaucratic English is less expressive and culturally specific, like how C lacks higher-level abstractions? Why would he think this is a remotely good way to communicate this idea? Or does it mean something else? I can’t figure it out.
He said, on the site that’s practically an assembly line for white English speakers appropriating butchered AAVE. But, I dunno, I guess it do be like that.
Note that he believes Kannada, his first native language, will gradually become the language of the local lumpenproles basically
Skull face did nothing wrong!
He assumes it is fitting that Ruby was not coded in Japanese and Perl in Dutch - English is the basis of programming languages
The basilisk (jan Pasili?) is going to force this nerd to speak toki pona for eternity.
The only reason these people don’t promote shit like Lojban or whatever is because it’s too difficult for them to learn it.
Someone cross-post this to r/badlinguistics
Tomas Pueyo on Twitter: “@vgr Another unique facet of English is that it’s the result of mixing 2 other languages, Germanic and French. That has several ramifications. Longer, Latin words are associated with aristocracy, while shorter, Germanic words are associated with the middle and low classes” / Twitter
Venkatesh Rao on Twitter: “And not because it’s gotten globally localized but because it’s gotten globally *delocalized* beyond loose association with the largish, continent-sized BEU zones. Spanish by contrast has gotten globally localized I think.” / Twitter
He is really into neolib global middle class as the “ideal class” and basically sneers at American poor/WC partly for racism and partly because he thinks they’re dumb
I am sick of vgr defending scott (claiming he was unfairly persecuted, not racist etc.) even if he finds the rationalists silly, being OK with the 2nd-most important writer of ribbonfield being a racist *eugenicist, etc. etc.
The more I look at the whole (post)rationalist-Paperfarm enterprise the more it seems to me the intellectual byproduct of people who need to 1. be … normal, associate with normies 2. go outside, maybe work for a normal job