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happytoexplain

9234

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2018-07-16

Created

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  • Language is tricky. One of the trickiest things! There's so much tied up in it, objective and subjective. It's a simple tool. It's an academic object. It's a well-defined spec. It's a living ambiguous blob. But it's also one of the biggest pieces of one's culture. There's a reason the French are so possessive of their language where it lives in cultural exclaves. There's a reason the Irish have laws to keep their native language alive.

  • I get it - I am not a hardcore prescriptivist. Language is defined by usage.

    But you're going too far in the other direction. Like... language nihilism. It's OK to care. Language is deeply, unavoidably personal. Look at how people describe the feeling they get when they read "how __ like": "Itch". It's not only an academic opinion - it's also a piece of who we are.

  • I disagree with the implication that "majority rules" is such an immutable truth that the minority shouldn't even bother fighting or expressing their opinion.

  • "How ___ like" is probably the single most common mistake I see among non-native speakers. Also, unlike other mistakes which can just sound informal, this one "sounds dumb", to use a mean phrase, but it's good to know for people trying to sound proper.

  • Maybe I wasn't clear - I mean each country must prioritize its citizens and native culture (i.e. the default position of most nations). Not that they must prioritize their native-born citizens over their immigrant citizens (once they are actually full-fledged citizens). The point being that one affects the other: Bad immigration practices (bad laws, bad enforcement of good laws, etc) negatively affect citizens, but the people trying to immigrate become citizens who we are morally obligated to then prioritize equally, so it requires a balance.

    You may make the argument that a country shouldn't prioritize anybody in the world, but it falls into the same category of argument as "there should be no borders". Yes, you are envisioning a beautiful world, and maybe in a few hundred or a few thousand years we will be able to get there. But each day in between we must give a shit about reality.

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