Words and Communication

Regulate
New Definitions:

The biggest threat to cultures is not the change of a language, but the unwillingness to accept that some rules are absolute and must never be broken or altered.

Previous sentence vs this:
The unwillingness to accept that some rules are absolute and must never be broken or altered is the biggest threat to cultures is not the change of a language.

garbage

The unwillingness to accept that some rules are absolute and must never be broken or altered is the biggest threat to cultures, not the evolution of a language.

This user sounds very "critical", lol: "Since the invention of human language there has always been a 'subcontext' used by those in power limiting ideas/concepts" Anybody else notice how retarded that premise is? The beginning of language was more than likely something like: (point) "Mammoth, we hungry, let's kill". "Critical theorists" "can't even" into biology, history or archaeology. Bunch of analytical philosophy posers. Frankly, they're all idiots, if I may be so bold.

I tried to find a language wich dosen't have passive voice in it. You know, so I don't see the world in terms of victims being subject to outside powers, and you know what? I found one… arabic. Really makes you think. Arabic culture might be a slave culture, but it is more assertive than modern western culture. It shapes the way of thinking into direct action, insted of subjugation to an outside force. At least that's what I understood, but I didn't dig deep into it. I hate arabic to much.

That's total horseshit.

The hebrew word for envy(covet in kjv) is chamad and the hebrew word for envy is qanna.

Quick anecdote:

When I was in grad school the logic prof I was assisting made me enter a 5 page paper into the pool for best PHI paper; it was rejected outright because it wasn't at least 20 pages long. They wouldn't even read it. That was in the mid-90's' I can't even begin to imagine what it's like now.

I have a terrible time trying to explain that nice and good are not truly synonymous. I have a harder time trying to explain that synonyms mean similar meanings, not the exact same and thus not interchangeable. English is losing subtlety and distinction, too many sub-humans aping our speech to enforce the laws of speaking. Too many mediocre fools given airtime. Too few staples of culture left, nobody reads Shakespearean works or the KJV.
I heard our speech is becoming more German in grammar. I hope that means my grandchildren will be speaking new words worth saying rather than these old words that have been sullied.

There is an entire generation that believes "perverted" applies to any erotic situation. Any.

Gah, I'm so shit at sentence diagramming. I have a vague understanding of how the shifting of the subject is creating a different perception of what is at fault where, but can you spell it out a bit for clarity?

There's a certain level of baseline understanding of things. Jordan Peterson mentioned in development little-little kids would potentially call all small moving animals 'cat' because 'cat' was a name for little furry things that move rather than specific to the object. Like a classification of thing rather than a thing in itself. We might conceptualize object-to-concept is being 'natural' simply because our language of English is built with specific objects and that is how we communicate ideas verbally.

"Manna from heaven" is an inherently passive idea. It just comes about, which is why in part that Islam is so popular in Africa gibs from heaven. But maybe there is something to that presence or lack of a whole thought-pattern in there. Latin has a whole idea of past-time I think that doesn't really exist in English, like a clear distinction between past perfect (completed) actions and past imperfect (ongoing) actions. Or maybe it was something else… Anyway, if that is the language of your thinking, it would have to have an affect on how you think of course!

Heh, maybe they didn't even read the winners either. It's amazing how little reading I did in college… what a waste.

Language has a built-in defence against this though, and it's the well-known 'literally-mill'.

Whenever a word is inflated, it loses its 'literalness value'. Literalness is the value of words. The point is that language has two functions: denotative, but also, so to say, manipulative. Whenever you use a word, for instance 'hate', you not only mean by it, but also teach other people that, well, it means what you used it to mean.

So whenever you use 'hate' to refer to what's just dislike or 'hateful' to refer to simple disapproval or 'hate speech' to refer to simple criticism, you are sooner to later going to break the word 'hate' because you are going to necessarily teach people that it doesn't really mean anything. This phenomenon is egoistic: through using hyperboles, you enjoy a short-term benefit in the sense of winning your audience's attention, but ruin the word for anyone else. Conversely, verbal restraint is altruistic; when you only use words like 'love' sparingly, superficial people may pay less notice to what you say, but you empower (I do enjoy this rare occasion to use this term properly) other people with the ability to convey a lot of emotion by using them, because you're keeping them rare. In this way, language is a highly moral area.

Sooner or later, people are going to notice that this inflation has led to a gap when it comes to describing true abhorrence, loathing, detesting. And since language hates (literally…) vacuum, people will either coin new words to replace 'hate' or, more often, just use 'literally': 'I literally hate this'. (What they're probably least likely to do is to use a synonym, but sadly, while 'language will always find a way' so to say when it comes to describing things one sees before one's eyes, it's definitely possible to degenerate people's vocabulary; one's capacity to express oneself and one's vocabulary are not the same thing, and the latter is far easier to damage.)

Of course, yes, 'literally' also suffers from this, but the self-healing process has happened with respect to 'literally' too: search for 'literally (yes, literally)' or 'literally, and I mean literally'.

tl;dr while OP's initiative is praiseworthy, don't worry; that S.-W. 'hypothesis', newspeak, and such are not really possible to happen. In fact, the former is simply a social push to make people care less about linguistic preciseness because 'it's all relative anyway'. Don't pay much attention to it.

Please STOP! It's HUMAN language; are you trolling? Any furry, furtive, running around creature with soft fur and a fluffy but will have a signifier.

I remember how people were mourning how the days of Monty Python were gone, of that sort of clever wordplay and thoughts in general. "Their education was different. We won't see their like again," so they said. I mean their generation was required to learn Latin, and in my mid-sized college of 12,000 students there was literally only 2 people in advanced Latin. And I was and am shit at it still. If people are not learning these other languages, ancient languages that actually produced essentially all of Western culture and philosophy, what is going to happen to the West if Sapir-Whorf is correct?

Fascinating material, and it does make sense. SJW's repeat certain words and phrases so much, apply them too liberally, to the point that they become meaningless noise. Essentially all a bigot, racist, misogynist means anymore is to be 'bad' thanks to their misuse. Same happens with curses being used to the point that they are mere emphasis rather than impactful condemnations or insults.

I do think we still need to be on our guard against insidious manipulations of language though. 'Equality' for instance is being completely re-defined to mean Outcome rather than Opportunity, and people are going along with it without even thinking about how terribly different those two meanings are. We've seen how words have been uprooted - eradicated if you will - from their original meanings and thus changed wholly from what they were supposed to mean. Imagine how difficult it is to communicate a word of another language that has no analogue in your language, but just apply that to within your own language. That is a different problem than mere linguistic impreciseness, and I think worth consideration at least.

There is a big difference between written classical arabic, and the kind of arabic regular niggers speak in the ghettos of Paris, but I see your point. I still want to find a language that helps me to think in ways I wouldn't naturally do, to open my mind, and avoid stupid ideas.
On the subject of latin… well I am a native spanish speaker and we do have that time distinction.

STRENGTH

The Eternal Jew strikes again >:]. This is probably how hebrews felt as they learned greek. How greeks felt as they learned latin. And of course how Holla Forums feels.

Let your yes be yes, and your no be no, for anything more is of the devil. The foolishness of God exceeds the height of the wisdom of men eh?

Well it could be the case that early human language was more motivated by the utility of things, like instead of 'mammoth' it was 'edible thing' which would have a certain name. Or perhaps it was like you said with objects being conceptually solid units and that what I'm talking about is a higher-level abstraction. What is easier to contemplate? Edible things, or a mammoth? I wonder if monkeys that wail in fear about flying things or crawling things think, "bird" or "snake" rather than "flying danger" or "crawling danger"…

Studying Latin, the dead Roman language, did more for my understanding of English grammar than years of English classes. It is a highly formulaic and logical language, and since you have Spanish and English in your mind already you'd probably find it very easy to pick up since they are partially derived from it. It's a great one and does change the way you think about things.

I agree, I think? LOL, I could write an essay on denotative vs. connotative language; but I'm not sure why that matters?

Indeed. Perhaps I shouldn't have glossed over the 'sooner or later' bit; while language does self-repair, we do have suffer our way through the age of hyperbole after all, such as happens now. And it is annoying.

'De-literalization' of language also has an added benefit (for its users, that is), which is making meaningful language longer and more tiresome to use. I described it in another thread recently. When you redefine meaningful terms like 'gender' or 'intelligence' to mean ill-defined bullshit like 'gender identity' or 'emotional intelligence', people who would still like to discuss those things' original, biological, measurable senses are bound to use tedious, needless specifiers like 'biological gender' or 'academic intelligence' simply to be understood. And even then, their very use of those specifiers reinforces the implicit idea that there is 'more than one kind of gender/intelligence' in the first place. So you would have to parenthetically explain every time that you shouldn't have to use the specifier at all. It's really a loss-loss.

(Compare the way in which you're supposed to make tiring NAWALT-tier disclaimers before stating a general rule.)

This is indeed why Latin should remain in the curriculum. Latin offers you lots of affixes and roots to help you coin a word you need. In informal contexts, it's fine even to miscombine Latin, Greek and Germanic morphemes; anything to be understood. (As long of course as you don't spam neologisms only to obfuscate a field of study; everything has its corresponding danger.)

That's EXACTLY what I mean. Life makes you pick an object, it needs to be named to communicate to your tribe, becomes definition.

Not to mention that the more parallel variants of a highly desirable trait, such as intelligence, you invent out of your ass, the more you connote the broader idea that 'everything can be redefined' and 'everything can have second meanings' – which, once you manage to implicitly point their attention to it, you can trust people to bring up whenever a truth is being discussed. 'Ah but that's just one definition of infinitely many valid ones.' Instead of engaging the argument using the established, dictionary one. It's a good, simple distraction: make people think that they're clever for pointing out that 'that's just your definition man'.

'Mammoth' probably *does* mean 'edible thing', or at least something similarly simple. All language is figurative. All words are combinations of past ones, and historically, they are more and more tied to the observable and material. All figuration is ultimately based on sensory terms. Follow any etymological dictionary early enough and every word will begin to mean 'primitives' having to do with nature, animals, the body, and so on.

A couple of examples:

'Abstract' is, roughly speaking, related to 'draw away'.
'Metaphor' is related to 'move over'.
'Conceptual' is related to 'take'.

The words we now find most unrelated to the physical word originally meant very simple physical motions. It's the same with literally everything.

A couple of examples:

'Abstract' is, roughly speaking, related to 'draw away'.
'Metaphor' is related to 'move over'.
'Conceptual' is related to 'take'.

The words we now find most unrelated to the physical word originally meant very simple physical motions. It's the same with literally everything.

It's misleading to speak of this in terms of some qualitative difference between 'generality' and 'specificity'. It's simply the fact that abstraction is as broad as possible until it is limited. Excepting the fact that, in real life, this is prevented from happening by our evolutionary instincts making us instinctively pay attention to living, moving objects around us, if you took a kid, pointed to a cat and told 'this is a cat', the kid would at first think that the word 'cat' means the world – the universe. Words only take on meanings through discrimination, pointing out things which are not cat.

In short, abstraction is arbitrary. When I point to a girl and say 'this is called a girl', it's equally valid to abstract that word to mean 'long-haired', 'weak-bodied', or 'foul-mouthed', as least until we meet a counterexample: a girl which isn't long-haired (the other two traits are constants), which leads us to re-abstract it. This is the reason that transsexuals aren't delusional, as it is regrettably said; they just redefine the term 'gender'. It's retarded, but language, for better or worse, lets them do it.

That idea of making language longer and more tiresome to use seems to be a major effect of political correctness in whatever form it takes. Circumlocution to be in many ways pointlessly 'polite'. Eventually it just becomes incomprehensible. I think about how when you ratchet communists up and they start sputtering out their internal definitions and jargon that, when the audience asks what do you mean by that, they invariably say, "Well, it's too complex. You'll have to read about it," rather than being able to convey the ideas themselves.

But that and brings up another sort of Tower of Babel idea that if a society lets the meanings of words get too out of wack, wherein everyone has a different definition for what they mean by X or Y, they may be able to speak to one another but they won't understand one another. The net effect of that, where people don't know whether they are male or female or even what those terms even mean for instance is absolute chaos and fractioning of society. That's massively dangerous and results in exactly a Tower of Babel situation where everyone wanders off, unable to understand one another. If I were trying to destroy a society from within, that would be part of my bag of tricks I imagine. Makes sense why it would be a major feature of Marxism.

As a side note, I like how German is extremely good at linking together words into new meaningful ideas. That feature is likely a part of why so much amazing philosophical thought came out of Germanic-touched languages. Latin and Greek are similar in their meshability. I remember that in German the order of words often denotes their meaning in the sentence ("The dog bites the mailman" differs a lot from "The mailman bites the dog") whereas in Latin the grammatical function of the word is built into each word with declensions and conjugations so that the order of their appearance in a sentence is technically irrelevant. English is a weird mesh between the two thanks to the various influences on it by Romans and Germanics.

Like the word is at the first instance a block of marble that, through elimination and discrimination to differ that word from other things it could be, is crafted into the meaningful idea that one can communicate to others with? Seems likely. The development of language, historically or developmentally, is really interesting. I don't know enough about it to know quite how to think through the process of how it comes about. Suffice it to say though that however it does come about, what we know of it once it is here and how it is manipulated and changed and evolved over time is definitely something we can grasp and mull over. Idea transmission is the science of memes and the study of image boards too after all.

In fact, people's choices of trait to abstract are an interesting biological record. If a child abstracts 'cat' to refer to speed and size sooner colour, this means that colour has less of evolutionary significance; that discriminating between size and speed aided survival more than discriminating colour.

'I don't mean to offend, and this is only a question, and I know that I can always be wrong, and I know that science was wrong before, and this is just a hypothesis, and I know that everyone is different, and I know that it all depends on the person, and I know that I should judge everyone as an individual, and I know that it is all only general statistical patterns, and I know that it is only going to refer to averages, and and I know that there are many definitions of intelligence, and I know that race is only a word, but are blacks dumber than whites?'

Nice metaphor. I think humans must have evolved specially for definitional reproaches ('no dear, this word only means those people who…') to be well-remembered one way or another, to make a lasting impression on the listener. This correlational problem is deeply related to science in general; the same assumptions which underlie our hasty definitional choices ('oh okay, a bird has wings') are wrongly transferred to, for instance, our biological knowledge (assuming that the proverbial birds and bats are related).

In fact, writing this train of disclaimers made me remember that a facet of dumbing the society down might also be vilification of abstraction. Specifically, I remembered that hypothetical askerwould also be expected by the society to make the disclaimer 'I know that racism is wrong, but…'. Then I thought how irrelevant saying that would be to the question at hand. And then I remembered how one wise man once said that science is isolationist in contrast to pseudoscience, which is 'holistic'. Namely, science abstracts real life to an abstract model defined by a number of parametres, while pseudoscience often says that 'everything (for instance, every organ in the body) is related/connected'; everyone knows this as a buddhist cliche. But it only now occurred to me that repeating this meaningless statement can be a way to make people hesitate less before making an irrelevant interruption a la 'what, are you racist?!'. Stressing that 'all is connected' erodes the criteria for what is a valid contribution to a discussion, because it's such a tiny step from 'everything is relevant'.

This is only a minor idea.

well

...

I hate what happened to the 'discrimination'. Same thing that happened to 'racism' really. That's yet another reason for children to learn Latin in particular: it breaks words up. The sooner are children able of morphemizing, so to say, for instance of identifying and isolating '-ism' in 'racism', the sooner will they be able to see that it's possible to parse the word as simply 'race' + 'with-respect-to', like in 'materialism' or 'polymorphism' off the top of my head, and, consequently, learn that the word can simply mean (and possibly originally meant) just objective study of racial differences; that not all isms are bad so to say.

While I hardly agree with the 'few words = few thought' aspect of newspeak, what Orwell did get right was duckspeak. Analyzing words can often reveal senses which promote better thinking.

I'm a lawfag, how much time do you have?

In France it's easy. The state is Marianne and the nation is the cock.

Needs a ten page apologia for being a fucking white male, but it's s good buffer.

Used to date this library science grad student in the 90's. Couldn't stand her friends… all of them such stuck-up tryhards.

Great examples. Gah, it creeps me out seeing this postmodernist bullshit. It is such a perverting cancer on the intellect.

All Westerners could use a little Latin and Greek, if only for their practical English uses as you described. As to the newspeak, imagine you had a notion for something that was different from the vast opinions of those around you, but you lacked a word for it. In such a case, what does it matter that you have this nebulous notion since the moment you try to describe it to someone else it comes out as a confused and meaningless word soup, like when you hear people trying to describe some emotional experience when they lack the vocabulary for it. Without the expressive potential, even thoughts can come and go without distinct forms. Pleb-speak around the world is usually less-complex in both its vocabulary and the ideas it can even express.

Hey, if you're a lawfag you should have some great experiences regarding how the manipulation of language goes on. It is sort of core to the game of law and justice after all.

What I hated about college was how all these snobby know-nothings would pine and sigh about all those, 'Poor uneducated people,' who just weren't fortunate enough to understand how right and smart they were… That kind of self-aggrandizing pity characterizing almost every ivory tower pisses me off.

Two right there.

(just realized I broke up my response)

They couldn't figure out with their library masters degrees what I could with my hacker brain for some things and there was a lot of mean girl response.

Definitely, but also remember that it's just as misguided to pursue a 'one concept = one word' ideal. Contexts exist; it's fine for 'key' to mean something different in housekeeping and programming and music. Insisting on using single words for everything would result in words that are either meaningful, but basically just phrases, except written without spaces ('doorkey', 'encryptionkey'), or short, but completely unmemorable coinings (if we use something random like 'asfeghe').

I think that when it comes to wordmaking, the safest bet is to just fill out historical linguistic gaps. For instance, I only recently learned that 'dearth' comes from 'dear'; perhaps there are other germanic adjectives that it is possible to nominalize that way. Or, an example I came up with today: I thought that a synonym of the word 'remarkable' could be 'of remark', for instance: 'a work of remark', after the pattern of 'a person of renown'. Such words are possibly less likely to confuse a reader, because they are really hardly new; they're simply revival of what should be used, but isn't.

jokes on you, shitdick.

My very point was that no, not even the degeneration of 'literally' will prevent people from stating the obvious when it happens (when it, in fact, something did happen literally); expressibility can at most be briefly obstructed. There isn't really a way to uproot language permanently. What's died in 'literally' is being born elsewhere.

Jealous as a good emotion has been completely eliminated as an idea. They can get anybody to agree to anything as long as they refer to it as "love". If you think language can't control behavior or limit peoples thought processes you're a naive fool. Reactionaries are the only way to set things right. Being passive only makes things get worse.

It's a way to brainwash, repeat memes and propagate groupthink. One that I've noticed them using more and more is "everybody knows X", it's a really stupid way to fake consensus but it works on television.

"Love" for the leftists is just being used to mean the 'good', which of course is just themselves and those they believe are on their side. That whole "Love trumps hate" bullshit always manifests into, "We are better than you," and also as justification for anything they want to do to you. Punch a Nazi in the face? Why, that's love trumping hate you see. They'll love you to death if they could. It's such a perversion.

One would think that the people who didn't give too much of a shit about anything would be the ones most prone to groupthink, but honestly it seems to be the morons who care enough to go out into the streets who chant the most asinine and mindless slogans the most. At least the 'activist' types who are trained brainwashed.

non native english speaker probably

Oh but absolutely. Positive aspects of (so-called nowadays) 'negative' emotions being denigrated is an integral part of today's 'culture', which has jumped to do that after the advent of in the west of buddhism, of which it is an integral tenet.

Anger, for instance righteous anger, promotes activism and justice ('I hate what the world has come to, time to change it!').

Jealousy promotes ambition ('I must be better than him!').

Anxiety promotes caution and being well-informed ('no, no, it's not as simple as this, I must be absolutely sure that this is safe!').

Self-hatred causes self-improvement ('I am such a piece of shit, I must change!').

Declaring the above emotions to be negative is 'good' for the individual, who, after embracing it, no longer feels compelled to change himself or his lot in life, but it is bad for the society at large, because it is no longer going to benefit from whatever cunning inventions or precautions may have been developed as a result of pursuing those 'negative' feelings. For instance, ambition results in self-improvement, or refusal to accept old age and ugliness results in invention of medicine.

Buddhism, embraced and endorsed by the west so completely, is filled with heavy-handed anti-intellectualism and anti-activism (calls to 'let go', 'stop caring so much', 'stop thinking so much', 'stop dwelling so much', 'live in the present'). (The occasionally mentioned on this board Sam Harris is an example of an 'intellectual' preaching such; just look up his quotes online.) So heavy-handed in fact, even normalfags notice it. From time to time, even normalfags ask 'but will following this advice not make me a lazy, passive person?'. Sadly, normalfags being normalfags, they are not prepared for the go-to manipulation which they get in return, which is 'no, you are only supposed to let go / stop dwelling/caring/thinking in moderation'. It's classic buddhist equivocation: to call for people to think and care less, then upon criticism switch that claim to 'no, I only recommend that as long as it doesn't make you a worse person', which is an unassailable position by definition: of course that with that added addendum, whatever is being recommended is fine by definition. So that whoever made the claim in the first case cannot be held accountable.

This is really rampant.

Ah user, no offense, but it is really subtler than that. It's not about that particular claim as much as about legitimizing figure of speech in general in communication. Figures of speech, like sarcasm, are the way to avoid responsibility for one's words. Take typical feminist vitriol like 'all men are rapists'. Any misguided man who has ever objected to a claim like that was met with 'it was obviously a figure of speech you idiot, what we meant is that every man can potentially become a rapist'. This is, simply, poisoning the standards of communication; normalizing figuration, so that it is seen as common and okay, an accepted parallel to fact-based communication ('x thousands of men have done act x as defined by document z'). And once that acceptance is established in the society, leftists can freely indulge in using such rhetoric, abusing the fact that it is still able to connote inferiority of any chosen group and trying to make it feel defeated.

tl;dr every time you hear a figure of speech like 'everyone knows that everyone does it', what they want you to think is 'oh well, there is no way to demand from people that they stop using metaphors, it is just too common'. No, it is not; you can make a change and demand literal, provable language (I am not as defeatist as claimed).

Yeah, I'm sorry, english is not my first language. Sometimes I forget the most basic things, maybe I Iurk too much and make too few posts