Tfw to intelligent to except the dominant dogma in my discipline (linguistics): "All Languages Are Equal"

>tfw to intelligent to except the dominant dogma in my discipline (linguistics): "All Languages Are Equal".

Once you have realized that there cannot exist equal things, order of rank follows immediately.

"Objectivity", masquerade of the zeitgeist.

tbqh, I agree with you. Many languages lack features that others have. Most importantly, 95+% of languages lack scientific and technical terminology without which it would be nearly impossible to think easily about most scientific concepts. Perhaps the "major languages" of the world are on equal-ish footing (moon-rune users excepted, of course), but there is no way that one can think as easily about certain concepts in Wolof as in English. Maybe in theory, every language can be roughly equal, but the intensity of usage in certain domains definitely expands what can be done with a language. In other words, there may not be a best system of grammar, but there are languages that are more developed than others in terms of especially vocabulary.

>except

I mean, I don't disagree with you, but don't be a retard, OP. The doctrine of equality (cross-linguistic; cross-cultural; cross-racial; cross-gender; etc.) is the cancer of our civilisation right now. What you're experiencing is not intelligence; it's the very normal phenomenon of looking with your eyes and seeing what's in front of you. People outside of university do it all the time. Your job is to see something else.

Your job is to learn to say 'there cannot exist equal things' just as you say 'these things are equal'. That is what the genuinely smart students around you are doing - those who've intuited the rules of the game.

AFIK (non linguist) you're not contradicting any linguist dogma. They just don't think that's an inherent difference since you can always borrow words.

>primitive African languages that can only count to 3 are equal to English
wew

English is one of the least completelanguages on the planet.

>science
>good

All languages are equal, but not all cultures are.
Oogaboogas are retarded hence their language appears retarded. If you imported some white people and raised them speaking these africans languages natively, they'd develop a rich vocabulary quick enough

Fuck off to /POL/

Is the tl;dr of your post that smart student = the ones who need to obey the lie because they have vested financial interests (rather, needs) in the discipline?

You should have looked at the OP pic.

I made a cheeky example that was obviously meant to be humorous, sorry it rustled your sensitive spots. The point still stands though.

They want to go into the discipline at all. If you're bright, you lie until you have a post, and only then do you start saying what you want to say.

It sort of does contradict main-line linguistic dogma though, since even the soft version of Sapir-Whorf has come under fire. As I glossed over in my first post, I think certain thoughts will be more natural and come more easily in certain languages, even if speaking a certain language does not necessarily preclude certain thought. This idea seems almost impossible to doubt, to me, since I know in my own experience that I think about time differently in different languages, since tense and aspect are almost never expressed the same way in two languages. Certain ways of thinking about the time/way of actions do not appear frequently/naturally in Chinese languages, but occur very frequently/naturally in English and other Indo-European languages. I just can't imagine that these differences would not at least influence how people view the world. My second language is non-native to me, but I do think in it sometimes, so I may not be the perfect case, but most people, even if they speak a second languages fluently, do not speak it natively.

There are no "things in themselves", therefore it makes no sense to conjure up some hypothetical scenario where whites speak an African language (to use your lazy example) because by that point it is no longer the same African language you are talking about.

How many people actually do that though? If the % is high enough then there would be no need for the lie at all.

Furthermore, the alternative view I am providing is not exactly common in the field. In fact I wonder if you could find the same objection to it being made in the 20th century.

I unironically agree with this and it make feel sad because the idea of training more complex intellects on primitive languages so that they could expand on the languages' principles and build on their aesthetic functionally is fascinating but won't ever be seriously contemplated even as a thought-exercised until we've purged the left in entirety which could take decades or even possibly forever.

*makes
*thought-exercise

Equal with respect to what?

**makes me

(This never happens, I swear.)

>by that point it is no longer the same African language
"Language" is not some self-contained entity, languages change and shift their rules all the times. For example, nobody could pinpoint the exact moment vulgar latin became italian, it's just that at some point this particular latin strain became estranged enough and it made sense to call it differently.

Presumably letter or phonem efficiency for words, word efficiency for sentences and the capability to accurately convey ideas.

The Chinese character for "good" is a compound of the ideograms for "female" and "child".

Basically, the Chinese are cucks.

What do you think of languages like euskara?

To take a recent espousal,
>It comes near to stating the obvious that all languages have developed to express the needs of their users and that all languages are equal. But this tenet of modern linguistics has often been denied, and still needs to be defended. Part of the problem is that the word ‘equal’ needs to be used very carefully. We do not know how to quantify language, so as to be able to say whether all languages have the same ‘amounts’ of grammar, phonology, or semantic structure. There may indeed be important differences in the structural complexity of language, and this possibility needs to be investigated. But all languages are arguably equal in the sense that there is nothing intrinsically limiting, demeaning, or handicapping about any of them. All languages meet the social and psychological needs of their speakers, are equally deserving of scientific study, and can provide us with valuable information about human nature and society.
>in the sense that there is nothing intrinsically limiting, demeaning, or handicapping about any of them
So as I said earlier, they resort to this idea of language-in-a-vacuum, as if there was any intrinsic-anythings in the world. The default position would be order-of-rank if these people had read anything outside their speciality. Instead they take the opposite to be default, without any substantiation.

That's the exact point being made against you. If it was completely different civilisations using the "same" language, it would be as coherent as calling latin and french the same language but different speakers.

The main failure behind those claiming languages are equal is that they don't realise you cannot define a language without encompassing those who speak it. There are no languages free of a user.

>>It comes near to stating the obvious that all languages have developed to express the needs of their users and that all languages are equal. But this tenet of modern linguistics has often been denied, and still needs to be defended. Part of the problem is that the word ‘equal’ needs to be used very carefully. We do not know how to quantify language, so as to be able to say whether all languages have the same ‘amounts’ of grammar, phonology, or semantic structure. There may indeed be important differences in the structural complexity of language, and this possibility needs to be investigated. But all languages are arguably equal in the sense that there is nothing intrinsically limiting, demeaning, or handicapping about any of them. All languages meet the social and psychological needs of their speakers, are equally deserving of scientific study, and can provide us with valuable information about human nature and society.
>>in the sense that there is nothing intrinsically limiting, demeaning, or handicapping about any of them
This ignores the fact that not all groups have the same social or psychological needs.

Well ofcourse languages are tied to their speakers. The phrase "languages are equal" means that there's nothing inherent about linguistic structures that limits any language from expressing any thoughts. Vocabulary is not a limiter because it can grow and a new word enters it as long as many people agree to use it in vernacular. However, the claim
>There are no languages free of a user.
is ridiculous. If we killed all english speakers in the world right now, we could still re-learn it by using existing literature. I guess if you want to be autistic about semantics, the most fair claim would be
>Languages aren't equal, but have the same exact potential for expression given the necessity and the desire of it's speakers to reach that potential

Where is this excerpt from?

Every sourcing I've seen says it comes from the (original German) Untimely Meditations, but in my Cambridge translation I cannot find anything exactly like that.

The translation is by Marianne Cowan, in the introduction to another N. book, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks.

Requesting that image about 'promises' and how the world doesn't really translate to African languages and how half of the words in the 'to Dutch' translation dictionary were created by the colonists so that the language could actually function in basic ways (measuring amounts and distances instead of simply saying 'up' and things like that)

I agree that they are wrong on the claim of an intrinsic property (or an intrinsic lack of one, rather), but I don't think order-of-rank is the only or best alternative. I'm of a mind with Quine regarding untranslatability, and I think that necessarily implies incomparability on any sort of quantitative basis. Even in analyzing the relatively simple trait of breadth of vocabulary, it's often the case that no equivalent basic unit of meaning can be established between two languages. Language is not atomic. Categorizing it requires both using it and ignoring or marginalizing features that defy predictable rules. Order-of-rank falls into the same vacuum trap as linguistic egalitarianism.

I think english, spanish and german are the most complete ones

>English and German more complete than Italian and French

Ew.

>The phrase "languages are equal" means that there's nothing inherent about linguistic structures that limits any language from expressing any thoughts
There's nothing inherent about linguistic structures, full stop. So the phrase is misleading. Also I'm wondering how what you are saying would relate to the difficulties of translating, say, poetry, between languages.

>is ridiculous. If we killed all english speakers in the world right now, we could still re-learn it by using existing literature.
Yeah but we would still be influenced by those users who had recently died. And further, we (the survivors, I mean) would be changing the language by become its users ourselves.

>Languages aren't equal, but have the same exact potential for expression given the necessity and the desire of it's speakers to reach that potential
But there are no languages, can be none, that are free of (the varied) necessities and desires. "same exact potential for expression" is the idea of taking a language out of reality and projecting it into infinity, how would we even be talking about the same language anymore?

is pol a parody of itself because it is now a recognizable ideology

Pretty much. Insert quote about cultures who think being stupid sarcastically just invite actually stupid people and make them harder to recognize.

>I'm of a mind with Quine regarding untranslatability, and I think that necessarily implies incomparability on any sort of quantitative basis. Even in analyzing the relatively simple trait of breadth of vocabulary, it's often the case that no equivalent basic unit of meaning can be established between two languages. Language is not atomic. Categorizing it requires both using it and ignoring or marginalizing features that defy predictable rules. Order-of-rank falls into the same vacuum trap as linguistic egalitarianism.
Just because a coherent comparison cannot be established, does not mean that inequality (the simple fact that each thing is different from the others) is just as absurd as equality (the contradictory claim that different things are the same). That only indicates one lacks the strength or framework to provide a convincing value-judgement.

Furthermore, your objection would apply to value-judgements in general, not just in the context of comparing languages. That is simply refuting yourself through explicit decadence, it's like arguing against breathing.

>To call the belief in substantial human equality a superstition is to insult superstition. It might be unwarranted to believe in leprechauns, but at least the person who holds to such a belief isn’t watching them not exist, for every waking hour of the day. Human inequality, in contrast, and in all of its abundant multiplicity, is constantly on display, as people exhibit their variations in gender, ethnicity, physical attractiveness, size and shape, strength, health, agility, charm, humor, wit, industriousness, and sociability, among countless other features, traits, abilities, and aspects of their personality, some immediately and conspicuously, some only slowly, over time. To absorb even the slightest fraction of all this and to conclude, in the only way possible, that it is either nothing at all, or a ‘social construct’ and index of oppression, is sheer Gnostic delirium: a commitment beyond all evidence to the existence of a true and good world veiled by appearances. People are not equal, they do not develop equally, their goals and achievements are not equal, and nothing can make them equal. Substantial equality has no relation to reality, except as its systematic negation. Violence on a genocidal scale is required to even approximate to a practical egalitarian program, and if anything less ambitious is attempted, people get around it (some more competently than others).

>it's complete because it's vague

It cover a lot of things but not precisely

latin is masterace, suck it.

Jesus Christ this fucking website.
first off, there are no languages with only three numbers, African or not, you just wish there were.
secondly,
>Oogaboogas are retarded hence their language appears retarded.
the language with the most phonemes in the world is an African language. It has twice the amount phonemes of English.
>If you imported some white people and raised them speaking these africans languages natively, they'd develop a rich vocabulary quick enough
the US utilized third-world languages during WWII(namely Navajo) as coded communication because the enemy couldn't decode the messages due to the complexity of the language.
You don't know anything about linguistics, the only thing you know how to do is drop "alternative-facts" to stroke your ego

You revisionist pieces of shit are a joke anywhere outside of your safe space

>Certain ways of thinking about the time/way of actions do not appear frequently/naturally in Chinese languages, but occur very frequently/naturally in English and other Indo-European languages
examples?

I think it's a mischaracterization to say that linguistics holds that all languages are equal. Rather, the 'quality' of a language in the traditional sense, as reflecting greater cognitive capacity or culture of its speakers, or perhaps its position in a historical development or cycle of some sort, is simply not a theoretically relevant notion for formal linguistics.

No linguist thinks that all languages are equally enlightening on every subject of interest to the linguist, or contain all features possible in human language generally to the same extent. generally linguists are interested in crosslinguistic studies for precisely the reason that not all languages have all resources, and in fact they cannot, because many features that distinguish languages are mutually incompatible.

The backlash against descriptivism in linguistics is just a ground-clearing exercise for theoretical work to begin in earnest, because someone who has never studies language theoretically confuses its study with prescriptive grammar, old romantic ideas about how language develops, etc. These are generally not interesting from a scientific perspective.

Lojban towers over all languages