Why Does Language Drift Happen?

Webby's Boyfriend said:
Indonesian and Dutch have relatively free word order but no cases (anymore, for Dutch), but they really would be helpful for clarity.
Gender shows mostly in congruency, adjectives, pronouns, articles etc. have to agree with their headnoun in gender, e.g. by repeeting an ending. That too makes clearer which word relates to which in a sentence.
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It seems easier to me to just have a fixed word order. I mean yeah with case endings you can in theory get by without any fixed word order or even articles if you want to go full Latin but then you get that scene in Life of Brian.

All this is moot anyway because the super agglutinative languages like Finnish are clearly the best.
 
Languages evolve because words come into and out of fashion to reflect the ways people live, sometimes requiring the creation of entirely new words all together, in and of themselves these new words are just additions to a pre-existing lexicon, but after a while, as you start to accrue a bigger set of newer words and as older ones fall into disuse, the language changes. Thats without even getting into things like regional dialects or cultural intermingling.
 
Your Weird Fetish said:
It seems easier to me to just have a fixed word order. I mean yeah with case endings you can in theory get by without any fixed word order or even articles if you want to go full Latin but then you get that scene in Life of Brian.
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Some non-native English speakers on the internet use the English language that way and make up sentences with the quality of "people called Romanes they go house".

Though, I think fixed word orders are much easier than cases too. Yet, easier is not always better, because a free word order (that usually needs cases) allows for more freedom and diversity, which is a good tool in literature, music and poetry. Being easy to learn for adults doesn't really give a language an advantage, because it lives through and from its native speakers (those who learnt it as a child).

"The sheep has lost its wool" would usually be "ovis illa lanam suam amiserat" in Latin and "das schaf hat seine wolle verloren" in German. Yet, word order can be freely reversed because flexion makes clear what is what, like "suam lanam amiserat illa ovis" or "seine wolle hat das schaf verloren". This is something one cannot do in English, or French, due to lack of cases.

Your Weird Fetish said:
All this is moot anyway because the super agglutinative languages like Finnish are clearly the best.
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Ehkä. ;)
 
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People mishear things. Complex grammatical structures are replaced by simpler ones. Difficult pronounciations are abandoned for more convenient ones. Words and expressions come from other languages.
 
Webby's Boyfriend said:
"The sheep has lost its wool" would usually be "ovis illa lanam suam amiserat" in Latin and "das schaf hat seine wolle verloren" in German. Yet, word order can be freely reversed because flexion makes clear what is what, like "suam lanam amiserat illa ovis" or "seine wolle hat das schaf verloren". This is something one cannot do in English, or French, due to lack of cases.
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Fair point. But a door being female and a girl being neuter is still complete bullshit.
 
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Happens so I can talk in anime and write in moon runes.
 
Coleslaw said:
People mishear things. Complex grammatical structures are replaced by simpler ones. Difficult pronounciations are abandoned for more convenient ones. Words and expressions come from other languages.
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"Languages always evolve toward the laziest outcome." (or something)- Daniel Pennac

Webby's Boyfriend said:
There are some (((native Nazis and Frogs))) who think that the gendered nouns thing is "sexist" (doubleplusunfeminist). As if demanding to be called with pronouns that sound like space alien names isn't enough, those want to rewrite core parts of grammar!
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It's happening in Italy, too, in the LGBT community. The new trend is to substitute with an asterisk the ending letter of certain words to avoid gendering. EG, the word 'tutti' (everyone) is masculine, so a lot of woke online magazines and bloggers are using 'tutt*'. A member of the Accademia della Crusca (the highest authority about Italian language and philology) wrote an essay to deprecate this habit, just be answered in the comments by the usual NB neanderthal that "We should do that to respect NB identities".

Another habit is to declinate to feminine words that are traditionally non-declinable. EG 'ministro' (minister), is masculine, but it was always used for women too. "Il ministro dell'Istruzione" (the minister of education) had always been the same title, it didn't matter if the person who had that role was male or female. Now it's woke to say "ministra", "sindaca" (mayor) "assessora" (assessor), and a lot of women find this so incredibly ridiculous, but nobody hears their protests...
 
TungstenCarbide said:
It's happening in Italy, too, in the LGBT community. The new trend is to substitute with an asterisk the ending letter of certain words to avoid gendering. EG, the word 'tutti' (everyone) is masculine, so a lot of woke online magazines and bloggers are using 'tutt*'.
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Luckily, when other people cannot understand what SJWs are saying, their lunacy won't spread in Italy.

TungstenCarbide said:
Now it's woke to say "ministra", "sindaca" (mayor) "assessora" (assessor), and a lot of women find this so incredibly ridiculous, but nobody hears their protests...
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In English, the female endings -ess and -trix are not used anymore, which is sad, because they sound cool, e.g. adventuress, teacheress, aviatrix, narratrix etc.
 
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Webby's Boyfriend said:
Luckily, when other people cannot understand what SJWs are saying, their lunacy won't spread in Italy.


In English, the female endings -ess and -trix are not used anymore, which is sad, because they sound cool, e.g. adventuress, teacheress, aviatrix, narratrix etc.
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We can do the same, there are words in Italian that build the feminine equivalent attaching a suffix. Presidente/Presidentessa is very common, but the ones I listed above just sound ridiculous. Probably is a matter of use/tradition, maybe in a few years my 6yo niece will use them without embarassment.
 
Webby's Boyfriend said:
In English, the female endings -ess and -trix are not used anymore, which is sad, because they sound cool, e.g. adventuress, teacheress, aviatrix, narratrix etc.
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We should bring them back. It increases specificity and descriptive power in the language, and pisses off troons.
 
TungstenCarbide said:
We can do the same, there are words in Italian that build the feminine equivalent attaching a suffix. Presidente/Presidentessa is very common, but the ones I listed above just sound ridiculous. Probably is a matter of use/tradition, maybe in a few years my 6yo niece will use them without embarassment.
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Dutch has many female suffixes, like lerer -> lereres, vriend -> vriendin, advocat -> advocate, verpleeg - verpleegster etc.

Your Weird Fetish said:
We should bring them back. It increases specificity and descriptive power in the language, and pisses off troons.
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Well...
 
Lets use the example of the word "Gin".

The English find dutch "Geneva" and love it but are lazy bastards and pronounce/slur it as Gin.
 
Webby's Boyfriend said:
Indonesian and Dutch have relatively free word order but no cases (anymore, for Dutch), but they really would be helpful for clarity.
Gender shows mostly in congruency, adjectives, pronouns, articles etc. have to agree with their headnoun in gender, e.g. by repeeting an ending. That too makes clearer which word relates to which in a sentence.


There are some (((native Nazis and Frogs))) who think that the gendered nouns thing is "sexist" (doubleplusunfeminist). As if demanding to be called with pronouns that sound like space alien names isn't enough, those want to rewrite core parts of grammar! Of course, people won't take commands on how to speak from anybody, that's not how language drift works.
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There’s a US movement that pushes the same thing for Spanish. They’re called Latinx. The thing though is that the only people I’ve met that use the term unironically are really white two-faced yuppies that can’t speak Spanish. Those soy boys came across as closeted racists too.
 
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IAmNotAlpharius said:
There’s a US movement that pushes the same thing for Spanish. They’re called Latinx. The thing though is that the only people I’ve met that use the term unironically are really white two-faced yuppies that can’t speak Spanish. Those soy boys came across as closeted racists too.
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The most retarded thing is that it's unclear how that's pronounced. I read it as "La-teenks", but some speakers insert a binding vowel and say "la-teen-iks", for others, the X is silent, "la-teen".

Same with that crap in French and German, how are all those points, asterisks and slashs meant to be pronounced?

Language "is a social construct". It serves us to describe ourselves and the world around us. So, many of them (Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Dravidian, Khoisan etc.) happened to evolve to show natural gender differences that occur in people (and animals, of course. Yet in unanimate things and concepts... rather not). I know, it sucks to have not only biology, but also linguistics, against you!
 
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Webby's Boyfriend said:
The most exceptional thing is that it's unclear how that's pronounced. I read it as "La-teenks", but some speakers insert a binding vowel and say "la-teen-iks", for others, the X is silent, "la-teen".

Same with that crap in French and German, how are all those points, asterisks and slashs meant to be pronounced?

Language "is a social construct". It serves us to describe ourselves and the world around us. So, many of them (Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Dravidian, Khoisan etc.) happened to evolve to show natural gender differences that occur in people (and animals, of course. Yet in unanimate things and concepts... rather not). I know, it sucks to have not only biology, but also linguistics, against you!
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Plenty of languages have grammatical "genders" just to describe inanimate things. Or to differentiate between holy and unholy things. Or long and short things. It just makes them getting pissed off at the indo-European scheme even more autistic.
 
Your Weird Fetish said:
Plenty of languages have grammatical "genders" just to describe inanimate things. Or to differentiate between holy and unholy things. Or long and short things. It just makes them getting pissed off at the indo-European scheme even more autistic.
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If somebody doesn't like this, that's his opinion and fine. Then he should learn a genderless language or create his own. But he shouldn't try to command other people on how to speak and write.

Such fucked up writing like @TungstenCarbide mentioned is now used virtually universally in official writing by German state institutions, while some SJW-infected universities in France now want to force their students to write even homework in such a style.

That's highly problematic, especially because language is "just" a social construct. When you mess with the established rules of a language, which have naturally evolved through history and on which basically everybody agrees, you can make communication impossible. I could call the internet "zoppelduca" and kittens "quoupsies", but that would be pointless (and autistic), because these words don't carry any semantic meaning (except for me).
 
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