A language at a time

“Oh but this language sounds scary-“ have you heard a child speak it while pointing at a butterfly?

“Oh but this language sounds silly-“ have you heard someone’s grandma recite a recipe with such practiced ease it comes off as poetry?

“Oh but this language is really weird-“ and yours isn’t? Everyone’s language is weird, dumbass, it came free with your fucking humanity.

Every tongue that is spoken is a work of art. Every language a unique window into the world.

it's a very english-centric way of thinking and there's sadly many people, many writers of fantasy, that don't see what they're doing.

people will use the language of the culture that colonized them.

if a specific culture invaded several other ones, it might result in those colonized cultures using that same language for communication, commerce, and travel.

we use English because of the fucking British. Others have used Latin because of the fucking romans. we don't speak "common".

The concept of "common tongue" or "default language" is so drenched in colonization people don't even see it anymore.

Us: speak only limited German

Lady: barely speaks English

Us:

Lady:

Lady: Czech? Slovak?

Us: Czech

Lady, to herself: Czech, that's a Slavic language right

Lady: understand Yugoslavian?

Us:

Waiter: Germany?

Me: No, Czechia.

Reminds me of the time when we were in Poland and I tried to order a burger using a truly unholy mix of Slovak, Russian and Ostrava dialect (which in itself is like an unholy mix of Czech and Polish).

*Each of us talking in their mother tongue*

Me: Bla bla bla.

Russian: I don’t know this “bla”.

Czech: Oh, we have “bla”! We also call it “that”!

Russian: Oh I know “that”! It’s a very old version of “this”.

Me: Oh, we have “this” too, but it means something slightly different.

it is unique among the civilised world's writing systems for many reasons. most notably, it is based entirely on the sound of the language and doesn't reference in any way the meaning! this reflects the european state of mind, where the 'sound' is considered the primary unit of language, rather than the written word. this philosophy is reflected in the continent's long and storied history of small feudal kingdoms, oral transmission, isolated communities, and widespread illiteracy.

the alphabetic system of the european region is fascinating, and deserves our respect: it exemplifies the diversity and flexibility of the human mind, and has numerous implications for its impact on european thought. it is, however, undeniably impractical.

if a person speaks the english dialect and want to know what is written in the closely related german dialect, there is simply no way to communicate. whilst it is common to fail to understand a people's spoken dialect - consider mandarin and cantonese - this system is unique in the following disadvantage: the english speaker cannot understand the written german dialect at all, unless they have expressly learnt the letter strings of the german pronunciation.

this is pretty incredible, considering that there is class of words in english that do have case markings - pronouns! the english personal pronouns inflect for case much like in Comanche or Greek. unfortunately, the case markings are mostly irregular in english, and don't have easily recognizable patterns, so they must be memorized.

and yet, even with pronouns that inflect for case, word order is absolutely paramount, and must be strictly followed for an english sentence to make any sense at all. making sure all your words come in the correct order is key to fluency in english.

Key parts of the legislation includes the right for parents to request Gaelic schools for their local area, and will help with standardisation of language teaching across the board.

Like I get that is practical advice, but people should not have to fucking do that. They should not have to train themselves around not sounding like AI, when AI only sounds like that BECAUSE it was trained on them.