if you get ridiculed or otherwise face consequences, blame the scientific establishment/corporations/government/Jews/liberals/other group you don’t like
never change your mind
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Bosnian-Montenegrin-Serbo-Croatian
Serbs, Bosniaks, Croats, and Montenegrins speak basically the same language
Due to ethnic tensions/hatred, a lot of people don’t want to admit this
The Serb dialect uses the Cyrillic alphabet, while everyone else uses the Latin alphabet
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Other Dialect Confusion
Hindustani
Its two registers are Hindi and Urdu
Often thought to be different languages
This is insisted on by many speakers due to religious differences
Filipino
not really a language
a standard register of Tagalog
the idea of it as a separate language has been promoted out of supremacist ideology
also, other Philippine languages are distinct from Tagalog, but are sometimes called “dialects”
China does this too
Italian
some languages spoken in Italy, such as Piedmontese and Maltese, are sometimes called dialects
this comes from the use of the Italian “dialetto” to mean a regional language
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Correlation ≠ Causation
saying two languages are related just because they have some similar-sounding words with similar meanings
you need to show a consistent phonological correspondence as well as evidence of how a link could have appeared
migrations of people or genetic evidence, for example
any two lexicons with thousands of words each will statistically have some similar-sounding words
even with randomized words you get matches
borrowing and coincidences happen
humans are very good at seeing patterns where none exist
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Goropism
invented by Johannes Goropius Becanus
says that Brabantian, a Flemish dialect of Dutch, is the original human language
completely coincidental that it’s what Goropius spoke
apparently it has more short words than Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, so it’s older
was spoken in the Garden of Eden
“Noah” comes from nood (need)
“Adam” comes from Hath-Dam (dam against hate)
“Eve” comes from “Eu-Vat” (barrel from which people originated)
hieroglyphics are also based on Brabantian
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Other Nationalistic Ideas
Latin is a descendant of Dacian, so Romania is superior or something
Lemurian theory claims that Tamil is the ancestor of all languages
Sun Language Theory:
all languages are descended from proto-Turkic, since they have some similarities
therefore the Turks are the best
promoted by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the first president of Turkey
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Neurolinguistic Programming
the bad NLP
New Age “human potential” load of horse manure
there’s also a version for horses, incidentally
reality is subjective, so by changing our thoughts and behaviors, we can do things
“using linguistics to program our minds and bodies”, whatever that means
name-drops lots of linguistic terms, but doesn’t really use linguistic concepts
similar to Brain Gym in a couple of ways
has been repeatedly shown not to work, but its proponents say they are studying it wrong and should just trust them
still popular among some groups of people
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Linguistic Determinism
strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
human knowledge and thoughts are limited by language
Newspeak
widely considered to be pseudoscientific
lacks evidence (e.g. color perception)
thought is possible without language
words can be combined to describe new things
we can imagine things without being able to describe them
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Even Weirder
There’s a guy called Andrew Schlafly
He has a theory about languages
some are more “primitive” than others
concepts don’t exist until there’s a word for them (like genocide or tyranny)
“history is the triumph of superior languages over inferior ones”
It is completely wrong
he conflates a language with its writing system
also confuses connotation and denotation
It is entangled with his right-wing fundamentalist beliefs
He thinks that “liberal values” are destroying modern English (an extreme form of prescriptivism, mixed with anti-”PC” screeds)
How “advanced” a language is seems to correlate to how much Christians used it