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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Posted: Sun Sep 24, 2017 6:18 pm
by Vijay
Quick and dirty summary of something that's been happening on a comment thread about Romani on r/serbia:

Troll: Gypsies don't even have their own language or script; they just speak everybody else's languages.
Serbian dude: Of course they have their own language, dumbass. They just speak different varieties of it.
Troll: Well, if they have all these varieties, then how is that a language?! Do you think Serbian, German, etc. have so many varieties?
Me: Yes. (lists a few varieties of each of the other languages he mentioned)
Troll: But those are dialects! Those don't have anything to do with languages. They have to do with the weather!

Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Posted: Sun Sep 24, 2017 6:32 pm
by mèþru

Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Posted: Sun Sep 24, 2017 6:38 pm
by Vijay
Oh, I know. (Well, sort of. They seem to like arguing with trolls over there until they're left tongue-tied). It's funny to me that he thinks dialects have to do with the weather, though.

Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2017 7:53 am
by Imralu

Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2017 8:23 am
by jal
Imralu wrote:sigh
Though the articles title is nonsense, the article itself has little to do with quakery?


JAL

Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2017 8:41 am
by Imralu
Dunno ...
He discovered that some 16 languages spoken in the Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh have 200 words for snow alone - some of them ornately descriptive like "flakes falling on water", or "falling when the moon is up".
... that sounds like utter crap. "Flakes falling on water" is hardly a word for "snow alone" any more than "light powder" is.

Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2017 9:29 am
by jal
Imralu wrote:that sounds like utter crap. "Flakes falling on water" is hardly a word for "snow alone" any more than "light powder" is.
It does, but that's not his own narrative. He might very well have describe the extensive vocabulary or expressiveness of certain languages with regards to their surrounding, and the writer thought "cool, more terms for snow than eskimos have!" and ran with that.


JAL

Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2017 12:43 pm
by Vijay
Imralu wrote:sigh
OMG my brother was just telling me about that article! I didn't realize it was this well-known. I was in the kitchen with him and my dad, and while my brother was telling me about it, my dad was telling him (about me), "See, he's not impressed at all." I told him about how sometimes, languages aren't endangered when there's nobody around to threaten the language, basically (and of course I immediately laughed at this 200-words-for-snow deal).

Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2017 3:44 pm
by Imralu
jal wrote:
Imralu wrote:that sounds like utter crap. "Flakes falling on water" is hardly a word for "snow alone" any more than "light powder" is.
It does, but that's not his own narrative. He might very well have describe the extensive vocabulary or expressiveness of certain languages with regards to their surrounding, and the writer thought "cool, more terms for snow than eskimos have!" and ran with that.
Ah, yeah, less an example of quackery and more an example of a journalist writing a piece about something they have no idea about.

Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Posted: Sat Dec 02, 2017 6:59 am
by Frislander
This thing

I mean it's not really bad or anything in and of itself but man are they inconsistent with their definition of rare; their list includes everything from Welsh to Pirahã, and the have Xhosa (native speakerbase approximately 8 million) as an honourable mention! Also how they completely mince terminology like it doesn't matter.

At least it's not as bad as some of their other videos on languages.

Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Posted: Mon Dec 04, 2017 7:02 pm
by mèþru
WatchMojo isn't really good at talking about anything besides movies, comics and tv.

Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Posted: Tue Dec 05, 2017 2:44 am
by jal
Frislander wrote:I mean it's not really bad or anything in and of itself but man are they inconsistent with their definition of rare
It's more like linguistic ignorance...


JAL

Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Posted: Thu May 10, 2018 10:26 pm
by Vijay