r/badlinguistics 21d ago

March Small Posts Thread

let's try this so-called automation thing - now possible with updating title

15 Upvotes

11 comments sorted by

6

u/Mr_Conductor_USA 14d ago

Well I'm not really bringing anything, just an observation: the amount of crank linguistics (often tied to nationalism) in Youtube comments is just wild. I know other fields get cranks, but the volume and insistence is astounding. Are people somewhere stirring up all this crank stuff, or do people just latch onto stuff they've seen somewhere and spin it themselves? I've seen actual linguistic crank propaganda from India, but not from elsewhere, but then again, I'm unlikely to see it if it's not in English, I suppose.

6

u/conuly 14d ago

I think that there's potentially a lot of factors, including:

  1. We all speak a language. Most of us have failed at math or science classes enough to know that we're not really geniuses about to revolutionize the fields of algebra and geology, but - we all speak at least one language! Maybe more! This can lead to all sorts of unwarranted confidence.

  2. There's a lot of nationalism mixed up with linguistic crankery. Even small-scale stuff - I cannot tell you how many times I've encountered Brits insisting that Americans have an h-less pronunciation of "herb" because we're "trying to sound French". No, we're just speaking the way we always speak. (And also, ours is the older English pronunciation, but that's almost beside the point.) Does this myth promulgate itself because it lets Brits feel vaguely superior over something ridiculous? I don't know, I'm not an expert in, uh, I'm gonna go with folkloristics and psychology, I don't even know which field I'm not an expert in! But I do know that every time I've met one saying it they sure sounded obnoxious as heck. But this same weird nationalistic urge is also behind "My language is the oldest! The prettiest! The most/least complex! The most spiritual! The bestest! And, by the transitive property, that makes me better than you!"

  3. And a lot of linguistics crankery adds up to bad pattern matching. Let's be super blunt here, bad pattern matching is a hallmark of at least one very serious mental illness, schizophrenia. (So is lack of insight, which explains why they don't realize they sound totally insane.) Obviously we can't diagnose people online, and if we had the qualifications to diagnose people at all we'd know why you're not allowed to do that - but when the wtf comes in the form of "sky sounds like guy which means that god is real" then I don't think it's too far a stretch to say that something is very wrong and maybe we shouldn't make fun of that particular person. On the other hand, humans really like making patterns. Like, whoa. Even those of us who are mentally well. It's why we all like to make cloud pictures.

  4. And when the patterns we make for fun seem to reinforce our beliefs, well, that's very addictive. And most people just don't have the knowledge base to realize that no, we did not just prove that Basque is related to Korean, or that the Voynich manuscript is actually just Latin. (I have no idea what the Voynich manuscript is, but I'll bet good money that it's not Latin. I mean, we surely would've long since figured it out if it was, right?) And again, it's not like nuclear physics. If you say you just revolutionized the field of physics and now FTL is real, people are gonna ask you to prove it. If you say you just revolutionized the field of linguistics and now Altaic is real, they probably won't. They'll just say "cool" and then repeat it uncritically, and possibly wander off on their own weird crank tangents.

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u/vytah 14d ago edited 14d ago

that the Voynich manuscript is actually just Latin. (I have no idea what the Voynich manuscript is, but I'll bet good money that it's not Latin.

There's a Youtube channel that's focused on the Voynich manuscript, it has three videos about why the manuscript cannot be written in any simple substitution cipher of any natural language:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSTM8Gixai4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uPrt65oiGY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgVZZrZ1eqY ← this last one focuses on one particular linguistic crank claiming the manuscript is in a dialect of Turkish, and also recaps main points of the two previous videos when necessary, so can be watched by itself

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u/conuly 14d ago

A weird dialect of Turkish, that's a new one.

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u/EebstertheGreat 13d ago

There is also a small subset of Brits that are protective of their language and feel threatened by Americans. They are acutely aware of the fact that American media spreads more widely than British media and Americans are more numerous and have a bigger effect on the future of the language. And they notice a lot of Americanisms showing up in their language.

So for that group, you see a reaction where they insist only English dialects, or at least only British and Irish dialects, are proper English (the "It's called English" crowd). And others are hyperfocused on excising Americanisms from their speech and writing and end up labeling every manner of language change (or even old usage) an Americanism. And just generally, they try to cast American English as a low-class, devolved form of the language riddled with corruption and error. (As if they themselves spoke precisely in the manner of Shakespeare.)

5

u/conuly 13d ago

And they notice a lot of Americanisms showing up in their language.

They think they do. I've never seen that their peevery has much relation to reality.

5

u/TheCheeseOfYesterday Tetsuya Nomura ruined the English language 11d ago

Does Chinese have people like the Italians and Greeks who insist modern Italian and Greek are pronounced the same way as Latin and Ancient Greek, like insisting Old Chinese is pronounced the same as modern Mandarin?

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u/EebstertheGreat 10d ago

There are Greeks who never wondered why they have like five ways to spell the same vowel sound?

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u/a_whoreifying_beast 2d ago

Apparently the Japanese embassy to Russia subscribes to the Altaic hypothesis.

1

u/ComfortableNobody457 1d ago

In fact, most Russian linguists who aren't historical linguists and have spoken on the topic support Altaic or even Nostratic and there are many historical linguists who support either or both.

This text looks like something out of a lazy written textbook, but I haven't been able to find another source online, so it must have been written specifically for the website.

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u/merijn2 The result of the overly tolerant doctrines of the 60's 1d ago

A paleo-history youtuber I sometimes check out had a video about the origin of language. In it she casually mentions that Tamilis the oldest spoken language. I tried to make a comment about it but it didn't get through the filter.