men fabricated the idea that they are the default sex to compensate for their biological inferiority and general superfluousness
this is not just the “natural order” this is the language of a patriarchal culture
Omg no, you are wrong on so many levels and as a linguist this makes me ache something terrible. In my linguistics class in undergrad, we actually made fun of people who think like you along these lines and for good reason, because you are wholly ignorant and are choosing to spin narratives about things and fields which you know completely nothing about yet pretend you do.
She: This word evolved naturally from Old English from seo/heo which were just words to refer to feminine-female people evolving from Proto-Germanic words meaning ‘that/there’. He as a word evolved from the same ideas but Proto-Germanic words for ‘this/here’. Your idea of “patriarchal language” further falls apart when you compare this part of English to other Germanic languages, of which English is related, the words in German for he and she are “er” and “sie”, completely unrelated. So it is by clear happenstance, not some patriarchal conspiracy that the words “he” and “she” in English have similar form.
Woman: Oh god this one always gets my goat when people go for this one. Man did not used to mean “male”, man used to mean “humanity/human being”, the old words in Old English for male adult person and female adult person were “werman” and “wifman” respectively, we can see this relation in words like werewolf and wife as being the remnants of the base “wer-” and the base “wif-”. Woman evolved phonologically from the word “wifman” by natural processes where the ‘f’ sound dropped and the ‘i’ became lax. Man dropped its “wer” stem for reasons mostly unknown but I can guarantee have nothing to do with “patriarchy” because phonological change has no basis in that.
Female: Male and Female actually come etymologically from two completely different words. Male comes from Old French “masle” which meant masculine, while Female came from Old French as well “femella” which meant young woman. This is another case, just like he and she, where the words coincidentally ended up looking similar without having any direct correlation in historical linguistic processes to make them as such.
Human: This word etymologically derives from Proto-Indo-European “ghomon” which means earthly being as opposed to heavenly being which would refer to gods. You have some small glimmer of hope here in that the word does eventually branch off into the word for “man” in some languages but this is still too small of a precedent to base any conspiratorial thinking like you are doing off of.
Person: This one offends me the most, simply because I love the fuck out of Etruscan language and your continued ignorance just irks me at this point. Person derives from “persona” from Latin which meant the same meaning, which ultimately derived from “phersu” Etruscan for ‘mask’ as Etruscans would often have theatre performers use masks to give identity to the performers. So never once did “person” have any meaning to do with “son”. So yes, this IS the “natural order” or language.
Please never proselytise your faulty ideology and misandrist thinking within speaking about word origins and morphology again, as unless you actually do fact checking, I will school the everloving hell out of you, stay in your lane.
is “chai” a TYPE of tea??! bc in Hindi/Urdu, the word chai just means tea
its like spicy cinnamon tea instead of bland gross black tea
I think the chai that me and all other Muslims that I know drink is just black tea
i mean i always thought chai was just another word for tea?? in russian chai is tea
why don’t white people just say tea
do they mean it’s that spicy cinnamon tea
why don’t they just call it “spicy cinnamon tea”
the spicy cinnamon one is actually masala chai specifically so like
there’s literally no reason to just say chai or chai
They don’t know better. To them “chai tea” IS that specific kind of like, creamy cinnamony tea. They think “chai” is an adjective describing “tea”.
What English sometimes does when it encounters words in other languages that it already has a word for is to use that word to refer to a specific type of that thing. It’s like distinguishing between what English speakers consider the prototype of the word in English from what we consider non-prototypical.
(Sidenote: prototype theory means that people think of the most prototypical instances of a thing before they think of weirder types. For example: list four kinds of birds to yourself right now. You probably started with local songbirds, which for me is robins, blue birds, cardinals, starlings. If I had you list three more, you might say pigeons or eagles or falcons. It would probably take you a while to get to penguins and emus and ducks, even though those are all birds too. A duck or a penguin, however, is not a prototypical bird.)
“Chai” means tea in Hindi-Urdu, but “chai tea” in English means “tea prepared like masala chai” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish “the kind of tea we make here” from “the kind of tea they make somewhere else”.
“Naan” may mean bread, but “naan bread” means specifically “bread prepared like this” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish between “bread made how we make it” and “bread how other people make it”.
We also sometimes say “liege lord” when talking about feudal homage, even though “liege” is just “lord” in French, or “flower blossom” to describe the part of the flower that opens, even though when “flower” was borrowed from French it meant the same thing as blossom.
We also do this with place names: “brea” means tar in Spanish, but when we came across a place where Spanish-speakers were like “there’s tar here”, we took that and said “Okay, here’s the La Brea tar pits”.
Or “Sahara”. Sahara already meant “giant desert,” but we call it the Sahara desert to distinguish it from other giant deserts, like the Gobi desert (Gobi also means desert btw).
Languages tend to use a lot of repetition to make sure that things are clear. English says “John walks”, and the -s on walks means “one person is doing this” even though we know “John” is one person. Spanish puts tense markers on every instance of a verb in a sentence, even when it’s abundantly clear that they all have the same tense (”ayer [yo] caminé por el parque y jugué tenis” even though “ayer” means yesterday and “yo” means I and the -é means “I in the past”). English apparently also likes to use semantic repetition, so that people know that “chai” is a type of tea and “naan” is a type of bread and “Sahara” is a desert. (I could also totally see someone labeling something, for instance, pan dulce sweetbread, even though “pan dulce” means “sweet bread”.)
Also, specifically with the chai/tea thing, many languages either use the Malay root and end up with a word that sounds like “tea” (like té in Spanish), or they use the Mandarin root and end up with a word that sounds like “chai” (like cha in Portuguese).
Every language does this! It’s called semantic narrowing (the process is, anyway). Here’s a post where @linguisten explained it. :)
I hate linguistic anthropology. Why? One of the most influential experiments in linguistic anthropology involved teaching a chimp asl. One of the most influential linguistics is named Noam Chomsky. You know what the chimp’s name was?
Nim Chimpsky.
Fucking monkey pun.
And this is in textbooks, in documentaries, everywhere. And everyone just IGNORES THIS GOD AWFUL PUN cause of how important the experiment was. But
BUT LOOK AT THIS SHIT. FUCKING NIM CHIMPSKY. I HATE THIS WHOLE FIELD.
Its not just the linguistic anthropologists.
There’s a group of very important genes that determine if your body develops in the right shape/organization… they are called the hedgehog genes, because fruit fly geneticists are all ridiculous. The different hedgehog genes are all named after different hedgehogs. And then someone decided to get clever and name one “sonic hedgehog” because this is just what fruitfly geneticists do.
Well sonic hedgehog controls brain development, and now actual doctors are stuck in the position of explaining to grieving parents that their child’s lethal birth defects or life-threatening tumors are caused by a “sonic hedgehog mutation”.
And this is why no one will invite the fruit fly people to parties.
Biogeochemical scientists, upon discovering the complex mechanisms that govern the storage and use of molecular iron on our planet, decided to call this cycle “the ferrous wheel”. We groaned about that for at least five solid minutes.
The phenomenon of sneezing when exposed to sudden bright light is called an Autosomal-dominant Compelling Helio Opthalmic Outburst. ACHOO.
*cis voice* idk like, I feel like using they for a singular person just brings out my sudden and previously nonexistent strict adherance to prescriptive linguistics but maybe it’s just me
My roommate the linguistics major has decided that the singular ‘they’ is her hill to die on. She’s started yelling “HAVE YOU EMBRACED THE SINGULAR ‘THEY’ AS YOUR LORD AND SAVIOR” and honestly I think it’s my favorite development of the school year. Also, fun fact, there is no grammatical rule saying that ‘they’ is only for the plural, so fuck the man and live your life.
i really love our generation’s joke trend of like, very calm but incredibly inflated hyperbole. like nobody says “oh she’s pretty” anymore we say “i would willingly let her murder me” and everyone is just like “lol same”
i think “same” is also great and “me,” i love when somebody reblogs a picture of like, a lizard, and just says “me” and we all know exactly what they mean. the current online Humor Discourse is remarkable because we trade exclusively in metaphors and implications and nobody ever, ever says anything outright and yet EVERYBODY understands each other perfectly
at what point in history do you think americans stopped having british accents
Actually, Americans still have the original British accent. We kept it over time and Britain didn’t. What we currently coin as a British accent developed in England during the 19th century among the upper class as a symbol of status. Historians often claim that Shakespeare sounds better in an American accent.
whAT THE FUCK
I’m too tired for this
Always add in the video that according to linguists, Native southern drawl is a slowed down British.
“Alas, I behold thee with pity, not with anger, thou common shot-clog!”
What the fuck is a shot-clog? I have no idea but I’m definitely using this next time I get cat-called.
Okay apparently a shot-clog is a person you secretly can’t stand but publicly put up with because you know they’re going to foot the bill for everyone at the end of the night. That’s such a useful term, why did we ever stop saying that?
I am literally in love with the fact I get to see how my little cousins interact even with a language barrier. On my mom’s side, I have a 3 year old little cousin who only speaks French, and on my dad’s side I have a 2 year old cousin who only speaks Spanish. When they play together it is so funny to see them blabber on and on to each other until one of them hears a word that sounds familiar and then they just repeat that word and nod like they’re totally connecting. Like today the one that speaks Spanish said “Venga a poner los pantalones en la muneca!” and the other heard “pantalones” and was just like “Oui, pantalon!” They’re best friends and it’s the cutest and funniest thing I’ve ever seen.
if you’re american and coming to australia, I’m gonna go ahead and say that you should be 100 percent way more worried about being king hit by a dude named “dane” in a bintang singlet than any fucking spiders that exist here
what does this say in english
“Good sir, if you are a resident of the United States of America and coming to visit the sunny land of Australia, allow me to inform you that you should be rather more concerned about being sucker punched by a gentleman named ‘Dane’ who is likely to be seen wearing a wifebeater with a beer company logo on it than by any of the dangerous spiders that exist on this lovely continent”.
ok so what does it say in american
“You’re more likely to get sucker punched/cold-cocked by an asshole than you are to be bitten by a spider”.
And translated back into Bogan Australian: ‘Oi mate if you’re comin’ to Straya I reckon you’re better off watchin’ out for that cunt Dane in the Bintang singlet ‘cause he’ll king hit ya sooner than a fuckin’ red back bites ya in the ass.’
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