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When someone insults your language. | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Laole Tetraglot Newbie Portugal Joined 5112 days ago 9 posts - 18 votes Speaks: Ukrainian, Russian*, Polish, English Studies: Portuguese | Message 41 of 76 21 December 2010 at 12:49am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't like hearing bad things about my mothertongue, which is Russian. It is a significant part of my identity. Unfortunately, I heard a lot of that, because I lived in Ukraine, where ideas like these from Arti's post above,are quite popular.
Politics, patriotism, traditions, religion mean nothing to me, but the language is important. It's internal, unchangeable, independent part of my brain, even if I rarely have occasion to use it. People that express their stupidity, insulting a language on the base of their pseudo-political obsessions, don't deserve a single minute of my attention. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Laole Tetraglot Newbie Portugal Joined 5112 days ago 9 posts - 18 votes Speaks: Ukrainian, Russian*, Polish, English Studies: Portuguese | Message 42 of 76 21 December 2010 at 12:59am | IP Logged | ||
Well, what else people usually identify themselves with? Social class, favourite sports, political views? No idea why should that be smarter. Edited by Laole on 21 December 2010 at 1:00am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Polyglot_gr Super Polyglot Newbie Greece Joined 5099 days ago 29 posts - 64 votes  Speaks: Greek*, FrenchC2, EnglishC2, GermanC2, Italian, SpanishC2, DutchC1, Swedish, PortugueseC1, Romanian, Polish, Catalan, Russian, Hungarian | Message 43 of 76 21 December 2010 at 10:23am | IP Logged | ||
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To an outsider Russian and Ukrainian sound exactly the same! That's why it is absurd for Ukrainians to talk bad about Russian. Edited by Polyglot_gr on 21 December 2010 at 9:42pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ThisIsGina Groupie United Kingdom languageblogbygina.w Joined 5322 days ago 56 posts - 72 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Romanian, Catalan, Greek, German, French | Message 44 of 76 21 December 2010 at 4:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't care when people insult English, I don't like English very much myself.
If people insult Spanish, I disagree because I love Spanish, but I'm not really bothered cos that's just their personal opinion. If people insult Romanian (normally calling it useless), I get slightly annoyed because I think Romanian is one of the most awesome languages and it's sad that so many people don't even know what it sounds like because it receives so little attention, and I think it's ignorant to call any language useless. If they say it's ugly, again I disagree but that's their opinion. I've never heard anyone insult Greek. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Pleiades Diglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5100 days ago 10 posts - 15 votes Speaks: English*, Welsh | Message 45 of 76 21 December 2010 at 4:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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It takes a pretty insecure person to be 'hurt' over somebody insulting their language!
It feels no pain, why should you? Besides, whether a language is beautiful or ugly ( if such characteristics can even be applied to language ) is purely arbitrary. One person's perception of beauty will invariably differ from another's. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7160 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 46 of 76 21 December 2010 at 5:45pm | IP Logged | ||
Yes. As mentioned in later posts, I have found personal attachment to a language to be strange and ultimately destructive. I can love a language (i.e. using the language evokes strong positive feelings for me), but to get all emotional about it and react irrationally to negative comments about its characteristics is just as stupid as going ga-ga over it to the point of harping on its "superiority". What matters is not WHAT you use, but that you use SOMETHING at all. A human is not worth less if he/she knows one language but another. Rather than think of a language as something unique or decisive in determining one's sense of being (with roughly 6,000 existing languages but over 6.5 billion people, I guess that a lot of us on Earth are clones of each other by virtue of using the same language), why not think of a language like currency? A human can learn ANY language, in the same way that he/she can use ANY currency so long as it's acceptable for transactions. Criticizing English's "ugly" unphonemic spelling in comparison to BCMS/Serbo-Croatian's "elegant" phonemic orthography is comparable to saying that American dollars are ugly because the denominations are green and gray while Croatian kunas are beautiful because the denominations come in shades other than green and gray. Unfortunately the conflation of language and personal identity has often been used to erect barriers to align with political or ideological criteria, and draw battle-lines. A particularly nasty outcome of this for me has been the degree to which nationalism/national identity can hijack a communicative code and so imply that people who do not speak in a way deemed satisfactory to the "tribe" are dangerous and worthy only of being ostracized or worse. Feel free to insult whichever language I use. It's quite unproductive to acknowledge the validity of the insult by responding to it in kind or getting defensive about that communicative code. The only time I will raise my hackles is is when you insult people overall, and that can happen to anyone irrespective of language. Moreover, I guess that people who are deaf and mute or practically unable to communicate with others have no identity and are somehow "lesser" than others if we follow the argument of language as a marker of identity to its logical conclusion. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6554 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 47 of 76 21 December 2010 at 8:50pm | IP Logged | ||
Where do you draw the line? Race? Nationality? Family? Self? I think people should not insult anything a person is born into, and has no control over. Language is one of those things. A famous martial arts philosophy is not being bothered by or responding to any abuse short of physical. But I have never met anyone who is that disciplined. Respect. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7160 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 48 of 76 21 December 2010 at 9:54pm | IP Logged | ||
It depends on why they talk bad about it. If Ukrainians disparage Russian because for example Russian Cyrillic differs from the Ukrainian version or because Ukrainian has the vocative while Russian doesn't, then it's absurd and meaningless to any serious linguist. However when Ukrainians dump on Russian, it's more likely that they're ripping it as a way to express displeasure with Russian-speakers - something that is beyond "boring" linguistic topics and draws on history, politics or just human antipathy. As Sennin wrote initially these have nothing to do with the language itself but this kind of criticism of a language only has relevance if everyone involved wants to blur the distinction between language and personal characteristics or identity associated with the users of that language. If I were Russian, I would take seriously some insult that generalizes all modern Russians as close-minded and autocratic which uses selective interpretations of Russian historical events. On the other hand, some "insult" on how Russian lacks expressive power or beauty because it doesn't use vocative or a copula is not an insult at all. Rather it would just provide a way for us to turn things into a somewhat academic comparison of linguistic systems that we know of - no harm there. Moreover I derive a certain satisfaction in demolishing the other person's "insult on language" merely by talking about languages and showing how wrongheaded it is to criticize a language when really the offender is hiding behind criticism of a language's grammatical characteristics as a way to denigrate characteristics of the community that uses it. If one would want to insult the people or criticize something other than the language, then at least may that offender be honest enough to admit it. Edited by Chung on 21 December 2010 at 10:06pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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