this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
523 points (93.7% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35896 readers
2022 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Question inspired by the image (see attached)

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Written Chinese could arguably be considered its own language.

Sure, by someone other than people who scientifically study human language, for the reasons outlined above. The study of orthography is its own separate (though closely related) field for good reason, though it's nowhere as big as linguistics, since it's not as scientifically interesting.

There are several spoken languages in China which are unintelligible to each other, but that look the same when written down since the written language doesn’t codify phonemes or even spoken words, but concepts.

You do understand why this supports my argument, right? Writing is just a largely arbitrary system of (imperfectly) encoding/representing human language, which must be learned, and is not acquired the way human language is. For this reason, it makes perfect sense that what is effectively a "code" for language could be used to represent multiple languages. You could just as easily do the same with written English. Heck, formal logic is specifically designed to do this for all human languages, but that doesn't make it a language itself.

Here's a pop article talking about the distinction, reflecting the discussion above (spoilers for the movie Arrival, which I highly recommend if you haven't seen it). I can't point you to any peer-reviewed articles on the subject, of course, because this has been decided science since the publication of Ferdinand de Saussure's 1913 Course in General Linguistics.

I hate referring to Wikipedia (again however, there are no articles on this because it's century-old settled science), but note that the article for Writing system correctly identifies writing as representing human language and not actually consisting of it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Spoken language is also learnt, not acquired by some magical means

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Spoken language is acquired, not learned. This is a formal distinction in the literature, used (in general) to distinguish unconscious behaviors from conscious ones.

Learning involves something you have conscious knowledge about - you can learn how to build a birdhouse, and then you can teach me how to build one as well, because you've consciously learned the rules for doing so.

Acquisition is involuntary, and unconscious. Children don't try to learn languages - any human infant given language input from any human language will acquire that language over time, seemingly without effort.

Also, the knowledge we gain from language acquisition is unconscious knowledge - as an English speaker, you can't tell me why "John hit the ball" is a sentence of English and "John ball the hit" is not, other than to give an explanation that will eventually boil down to "because it just isn't". You don't know why your language is the way it is - you just implicitly know exactly how it is, and how it isn't.

So, acquisition being distinct from learning requires no magic - just an understanding of the differences between these two processes, in the same way as we can also understand the differences between writing and language, one of which is that language is an unconscious, acquired behavior, and that writing is a conscious, learned behavior.