Best products from r/badlinguistics

Yeah, but as an SLA guy I kind of get annoyed by the use of fluent to mean "really flippin' good at a language". We have this really nice framework of "Complexity - Accuracy - Fluency" that we can use to talk about a learner's language skills with a bit more finesse, or to talk about activities that target certain abilities. Fluency in SLA means the ability to use a skill without stumbling, so you can talk about fluent speakers and fluent readers, you can help students build their writing fluency, and so on. But because "fluent" means "hella good at a language" to most people, it's hard to introduce people to that very useful framework.

Obviously I don't think they're wrong about the popular definition of fluent, I just think the popular definition of fluent isn't very useful for talking about second language skills.

Sapir was vague when he started his linguistic relativity business. However, Whorf took it to a whole new level and basically said that language constricts our mode of thought. This is pretty bogus, since its a.) backed up by false data (debunked in Hopi Time; a hilariously long categorization of temporality in Hopi which Whorf said didn't exist. Available for the low price of $240), b.) not supported empirically, but by supposition, and c.) not even backed up by simple thought experiments. There is something to say about linguistic relativity in terms of obligated expression as well as other influences of one's native language. To put it frankly, language doesn't allow or deny anything though we do see certain tendencies in language for various different modes of expression (which in itself doesn't explicitly say much about the causal connection between language and thought). Safe to say that there are a whole range of factors other than language which may influence thought.

edit: to clarify, what I mean by obligated expressions is that there are some things that you a language calls for in expressions. The popular example being describing your dinner plans with a neighbor; German you must indicate their sex, whereas English you don't. This isn't to say English can't, it's just not obligated.

I've found the Dictionaries of Basic/Intermediate/Advanced Japanese Grammar to be the one of, if not the most useful thing, I've found to help with learning Japanese.

Sam Martin's Reference Grammar of Japanese is also excellent, but good luck finding a copy.

Analyzing languagejones

• comments per month: 51.4 ^I ^have ^an ^opinion ^on ^everything
  
• posts per month: 1.5 ^lurker
  
• favorite sub linguistics
  
• favorite words: you're, really, speakers
  
• age 0 years 11 months
  
• profanity score 0.6% ^Gosh ^darnet ^gee ^wiz
  
• trust score 77.3%
  
  
• Fun facts about languagejones
  
  • "I'm a native speaker of AAVE because of my childhood speech community."
    
  • "I've studied that has a written tradition."
    
  • "I've only ever heard people claim "two negatives make a positive" and then give an example of multiplying negatives."
    
  • "I am very careful to separate out of my data."
    
  • "I've seen look like they were made in R, using the R Color Brewer package."
    
  • "I'm a geospatial n00b, so I started with this book)."
    
  • "I've never seen it as "linalg." I like that, but I'm uncertain how to pronounce it."
    
  • "I am just in the process of learning some French equivalents."
    
  • "I am not familiar with the concept of unconscious bias."
    
  • "I've got a speaker who has just a long nasalized schwa for "I don't know." There is, however, a nice pitch contour."
    
  • "I've been talking with Dr."
    

A good book which proves this beyond any reasonable doubt is Behold!!! the Protong. It was written and illustrated by a remarkable individual named Stanislav Szukalski.

Honestly, Language Myths covers most of this, and a decent amount of the book is available through the Amazon Preview here. At the very least, the myth names in the table of contents- "Myth 1: Languages should not be allowed to vary or change" are visible- and fairly straight forward.

A good book on the subject I think you would like is The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, It's where I got the info on the Sintashta culture I mentioned above.

It's fascinating how speakers of vastly different languages can employ the exact same methods to "demonstrate" that it is their language from which all other languages are derived.

Here's a short list of languages for which people have made such a claim. Feel free to add to it:

German/Old High German (see comment below for info. it's all in German though)

Albanian (this was posted on here some while back and has become somewhat of a legend.)

Tamil (obviously)

Greek

Sanskrit

Arabic (this guy is crazy. i'm not sure he's been featured on here. badling galore, and even in a pseudo scientific way.)

Edit:

Hebrew (thanks to the post that was posted here recently)

Romanian (a discussion on this sub from a few weeks ago)

Edit:

Frogs

I feel similarly whenever I see a popular science/philosophy/crackpottery book with "Dr. Archibald Cornelius, PhD" or whatever on it. It makes me feel that their argument is weak enough that "hey, I have a degree!" is the best way to support it.

Serious scientists do this too sometimes, but not very often.

> I think too often the linguistic community ignores prescriptivism as a meaningful social construct

Linguists don't ignore prescriptivism; they reject it as being unscientific. Much of what prescriptivists claim we ought to say or write doesn't stand up to scrutiny in the face of the linguistic evidence. That's the point.

It's not true to say that if you a descriptivist, you can't advocate for using formal language in an essay, or advise people on how to deliver a presidential speech. You just do it from an informed scientific point of view. For example, Steven Pinker, linguist and cognitive psychologist, wrote a style guide a few years ago as a modern descriptive alternative to Strunk and White et al.

On Strunk and White, this podcast episode by John McWhorter (Against Strunk and White) will give you more insight into the folly of prescriptivism. Well worth listening to.

Hungarian linguistics is frequently bad linguistics. One of my most treasured possessions is this thing, claiming Hungarian is related to both the Altaic languages and Sumerian.

This book https://www.amazon.com/Dear-Leader-Escape-North-Korea/dp/1476766568 written by a defector has a part where he mentions that the common speech of Chinese Koreans is pretty much the same dialect as that of the northern North Hamyong province of DPRK.

According to this, it seems to be -og for living organisms. So moosog?

This

The Language Hoax by John H. McWhorter.

I'm imagining The Truman Show meets Fight Club meets Hogs Gone Wild. So I'm in.