E-sports starts with a vowel so it would instead be "l'e-sports" right?
Sacre bleu, je suis "owned."
<the sound of Gendarmes breaking down the door to my apartment>
The Fr*nch spend all this effort to kill regional culture and police their language only for their international image to be taken over by the Bretons with their silly little berets and striped shirts.
edit: and the world thinks they still talks like "sacre bleu ou la la" which is like if people thinks the english still says "hark, forsooth!"
which is like if people thinks the english still says “hark, forsooth!”
Which they do
These two things are, in fact, one thing. Parisian French culture has been committing genocide against other French cultures since the Renaissance.
Ahh yes the French Office of Language Suppression, and their eternal quixotic crusade against Linguistic Descriptivism.
How do you say "Eat shit" in French?
Say what you will about gamers, but they're scaring Fr*nch people.
for me as a bilingual fluent person i think its a little weird to preserve languages. like it would be objectively better if all slavic languages were one language for instance because it enhances interconnectedness.
on the other hand, i can see the argument for cultural preservation. like china for instance has mandarin and theyre able to keep their system all nice and tidy because few anglos are interested in learning mandarin and causing problems in the mainland. and there is an argument that language and cultural history can make you think in different ways which helps you solve certain problems more efficiently in diverse teams. but idk. its hard for me to assign huge importance to my being able to speak czech. if anything i see it as more useful for understanding larger slavic languages like russian or polish.
Like obviously we should write everything down so we can translate old documents but beyond that? Idk
I think if everyone in the world started speaking only English (or any other single language) it would be a much less cool place. For the same reason, I don't think it makes any sense to say it would be "objectively" better if all the Slavic languages were condensed down into a single language that everybody spoke. Multilingualism is great and it's probably a good thing to have a lingua franca that helps everybody communicate, but that's a totally different concept than getting rid of differences between languages.
An example of the end result of a desire to rationalize culture is the McDonaldsization / Americanization that's happened all over the globe.
(That being said, the policies of the Académie francaise tend to be pretty ridiculous in the way they try to arrest any natural change in the language)
i mean i can see that argument, but there is still a trend for languages to merge into a larger one the more interconnected a society is. the only real way to preserve language and culture is full anprim seclusionism, but obviously that concept is antithetical to communism and socialism
maybe my pan-slavism is showing lmao
honestly, i just dont have a strong opinion either way. in the limited context of being a czech speaker i usually just see people who jerk off to preserving our language as ultranationalists. obviously, i dont wanna apply my experiences here to other small languages.
Esperanto is interesting but imo you'd have better luck taking a big language in the same group and making a simpler version of it for the rest of the group that almost everyone can understand. So for Slavic, take Russian and simplify it to the point that everyone can understand it and use it to learn other Slavic langauges and speak 'Simplified Russian' with little effort. The Soviets did do this a little but not entirely, though I think they were limited by how much of a statistical analysis of language they could do at the time. If they were still around... :thonk-cri:
I feel like that sentence by itself should be classified as a chud cognitohazard.
Preserving languages of cultures who have been mauled by Imperialism is important, but this is just (Parisian) France being up it's own ass and refusing to understand or admit that languages are fluid and continually changing as people use them. It's the epitome of stupid, priggish arrogance, quite literally trying to hold back the progress of time to maintain a static and non-existent cultural ideal.
Theres something to be said about wanting to annihilate a culture in its entirety (re: fascism and imperialism) vs. a natural assimilation of cultures as societies become more interconnected. At least with assimilation, the culture does technically live on, just under a new language. However wanting people to assimilate and remove all previous cultural elements of their own is imperialism
Also, cultures and languages generally don't die that easily, well unless there's a targeted project of cultural genocide. The Balkan countries managed to preserve their Slavic character through various conquests from Byzantium, the Ottomans, and pressure from western European powers.
I mean yeah, Czech went through that period. We have a ton of loanwords from German. And I've been accused of having a German accent by Americans and some Slavs sometimes :guts-rage:
My ancestors were all highly bilingual. We have it on good authority that our family fluently spoke Slovak, Czech, Polish, German, sometimes Hungarian, and many even knew English from the 1800s onward. With Czechs, we were given somewhat preferential treatment under Austria-Hungary and that led to people being more bilingual than giving up Czech. Whereas many old people in the Czech community here in America were actually beaten for speaking a foreign language in school, and there was a lot of trickery on our part to avoid persecution (calling ourselves Germans pre-WW1, calling ourselves Czech midwar). And part of that was a lot of people forgot how to speak Czech well over time and 'assimilated' faster than in empires that we were part of for centuries. This is obviously bad. But assimilation is also happening faster in modern times, especially with the advent of new language learning tools and the internet, completely uncoerced.
as someone who lives in a settler colonial english shithole, I think the world would be much better if everyone else in the world actively stopped learning English
part of it is cultural preservation, the other part is to keep the cancer from spreading
i think its a little weird to preserve languages. like it would be objectively better if all slavic languages were one language for instance because it enhances interconnectedness.
In Canada, First Nations languages Chipewyan, Cree, Gwich’in, Inuinnaqtun, Inuktitut, Inuvialuktun, North Slavey, South Slavey and Tłįchǫ are taught in schools. Making all languages one is what the residential schools tried to do, and it is rightly regarded as an act of genocide.
Went over that in another post. Of course, I only really speak on the Czech situation. I think having a sort of pan-Slavic language would be better for Slavic countries as a whole in resisting imperialism from the EU and West. I'd be hesitant to apply that standard to indigenous people in America because I'm not indigenous. And of course a lot of Czechs would disagree with me, but I feel like its a pretty regular strain of thought in far left circles in Czechia.
One slavic language would be very cool, already probably around 40% of words are very similar across all slavic languages. Which alphabet do you think would be better latin or cyrylic? I had heard that cyrylic is better suited to slavic languages
Look I hate tech jargon as much as the next person, but I'm willing to pursue a tactical alliance if it means teaming up against The Fr*nch
Love when the French, anglos, and gamers fight. We all benefit from this
Who would win? A group of wealthy Parisians who work tirelessly to preserve their culture and have done so for centuries? Or gamers?
Like 40% of english is french words already but now you're suddenly scared? shut up nerds
fuck l'académie française
critical support to our big wet gamers
White fash not even waiting until they've exterminated the brown folk before they turn on each other
France has been doing this for ages. this is why a walkman is known as a balladeur in France and a hamburger is called a saucepain ("sauce bread"). similar movements have been a thing among nationalists in Europe for literal centuries - back before Germany even existed as a state there were German nationalists who refused to use latin, greek or egyptian loan words and called insects "Kerbtiere" ("segmented animals") or mummies "Dörrleichen" ("dried corpses") out of spite. Nowadays this is mostly a fringe neo nazi thing, only nazi skins in Germany will translate t-shirts to "T-Hemden" or internet to "Weltnetz", but the French still do this nonsense officially and are now at the point where the boomer-ass linguists who are charged with "preserving" the French language have become aware there is such a thing as video games.
translate t-shirts to “T-Hemden” or internet to “Weltnetz”
We do this in Finland, lol. Every word has an official "proper" Finnish translation maintained by the Institute for the Languages of Finland, though often people will tend go with colloquial loanwords instead, especially with more modern tech-y stuff. The thing is though, the pronounciation and spelling of the words is modified to fit Finnish phonetics, unlike in something like German where they just plop "T-SHIRT" or "COMPUTER" in the middle of a sentence
Maybe English is just easier to pronounce for Germans, but there's a reason people say "t-paita" instead of "tiishört/tiishööt" in Finland
Normal french people, to be clear, think that l'internet est tres cool. The formal stuff is only assholes and the Quebecois, but I repeat myself.
